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Tag: fungi

  • The Last of Us Developer Diaries Begin

    The Last of Us Developer Diaries Begin

    Despite the announcement of the PlayStation 4, Naughty Dog is still putting the finishing touches on what is likely to be one of the last big exclusives for the PlayStation 4.

    The Last of Us is now a little over three months away from its delayed June 14 release date, and but the game’s marketing campaign is rolling ahead with developer diaries that give gamers a glimpse into what the developers were thinking while designing and implementing the game. First on the list of things they were thinking: the “zombies” aren’t zombies.

    In the first The Last of Us dev diary, titled “Hush,” Naughty dog talks about its inspirations for the “infected,” including parasitic fungi that take over ants. The art design for the infected evidently came from research done on real skin infections and fungal infections, which explains their disgusting appearance. The developers go on to comment about the sound design for the infected and a bit about their life cycle.

  • Researchers Confirm that Alaska is not Facing the Wrath of an Alien Blob

    The appearance of a strange orange goo in an Alaskan village led many to spout rumors that the substance was extraterrestrial and toxic.

    For the past year scientific researchers have analyzed the goo and formulated theories as to its exact makeup: “researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) first believed that the weird goo was created by millions of tiny crustacean eggs, […] upon closer analysis, the scientists changed their diagnosis, saying that it was actually a mass of spores from a type of fungus called rust – named so for its distinctive orange color – though in a quantity and location never before seen.

    NOAA was getting closer but could not pinpoint the species without calling in specialists. To identify the specific form of fungus they consulted a Mycologist, “a botanist who specializes in fungi; […] a conclusive identification came from a collaboration between the American and Canadian Forest Services.”

    Jennifer Frazer covered the strange story on her “Artful Amoeba” blog for Scientific American, and reported that the mystery had finally been solved: “the identity of the rust has been revealed at last. It is the Spruce-Labrador Tea Needle Rust, Chrysomyxa ledicola, a parasite of both spruce trees and a rhododendron — a flowering woody shrub common to conifer understories the world over — called Labrador Tea.”

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    The reason why these fungi appeared in such significant quantities remains a mystery but Yahoo News claims the occurrence is a “perfectly natural phenomena.” They also went on to explain that something similar happened in NewPort News, VA when “a bizarre, 4-foot (1.2 meters) brown-and-yellow blob was found; “the mysterious aquatic blob turned out to be a bryozoan, a colony of tiny animals that eat algae.”