• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Glowing Wood Now An Option Thanks To A Curious Fungus’s Ghostly Bioluminescence

December 3, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A team of scientists have created a new kind of wood that glows in the dark thanks to the presence of a fungus that exhibits bioluminescence. It sounds like a building material fresh out of Avatar, but this ghostly glow is seen in nature as what’s known as “foxfire” – a phenomenon that inspired the team to try and work it into building materials.

Equipping wood with new functionalities is part of a wider goal to find more sustainable uses for Swiss hardwood than burning, which is where a lot of it currently goes. That goal has most recently extended to creating luminous wood in a project led by fungal researcher Francis Schwarze from Empa’s Cellulose & Wood Materials lab in St. Gallen.

Advertisement

Getting it to glow all hinged on a parasite known as ringless honey fungus, Desarmillaria tabescens, which produces luciferin. Under the right conditions, this luciferin glows as the result of enzyme activity, so Schwarze and colleagues tried to recreate the effect in wood samples that had been permeated by its fungal threads. In doing so, they borrowed a nifty trick of nature to create a material that could theoretically be applied to all kinds of things, from luminous park signs to a very ghostly home esthetic.

“Naturally luminous wood was first described around 2,400 years ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle,” Schwarze said in a release. “Artificially produced composite materials of this kind would be interesting for many types of application.”

glowing wood in the dark emits a green glow thanks to fungus

The glowing wood in all its glory.

Image credit: Schwarze et al., Advanced Science, 2024 (CC BY 4.0)

Honey fungus isn’t the only kind that glows, there are actually over 70 species that show bioluminescence, but it’s a good option for making luminous wood as it can infiltrate it without reducing its stability. The team observed how it snuck into the balsa wood samples by degrading lignin, but that the remaining cellulose was enough to keep the balsa wood strong.

Blending the fungus and wood in this way created a biohybrid, one that’s at its most glowy when it has been incubated for three months. During that time, the balsa wood took on eight times its weight in moisture to accommodate the honey fungus’s love of all things wet. 

Advertisement

The enzyme reaction that facilitates the bioluminescence is triggered when the biohybrid fungus-wood is exposed to air, fully kicking in after about 10 hours as it emits green light with a wavelength of 560 nanometers. The glow then lasts for around 10 days, and the team hopes they can up the wow factor with some tinkering.



 “We are now optimizing the laboratory parameters in order to further increase the luminosity in the future,” added Empa researcher Giorgia Giovannini.

If things glowing that you didn’t expect to is your bag, then you’ll love the work of Finding Fluorescence – a team trying to track down animals that glow thanks to a curious trick of the light that differs from bioluminescence. They just added 15 new species to their list, and you can see some of them in all their fluorescent wonder here.

Advertisement

The study is published in Advanced Science.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Amazon releases a Kindle software redesign to make navigation easier
  2. The mystery of Elon Musk’s missing gas
  3. Starseeds: Psychologists On Why Some People Think They’re Aliens Living On Earth
  4. What Are The Chances Of An Asteroid Hitting The Earth Soon?

Source Link: Glowing Wood Now An Option Thanks To A Curious Fungus’s Ghostly Bioluminescence

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version