Take any healthy leaf, cut it into two-millimetre squares, and fungi grow out of nearly every one — more than twenty species from a single leaf, and most of them have never been named. Some plants inherit their fungi in the seed, like furniture. Most catch them out of the air within a fortnight of opening a new leaf. Plus the grass that sickens cattle because of what it inherited, the panic grass that survives 65°C because of a virus inside a fungus inside itself, and the awkward possibility that "endophyte" doesn't name a way of living at all — just a place we happened to look.
Fungi · Mind · The edges of science
Fungi are their own kingdom of life — closer to us than to plants — and most of their species have never even been named. Beneath a single forest floor runs a web of fungal threads that trades sugar, water, and maybe something stranger between trees. And at the far edge of all this sit the questions that keep us up at night: Can something think without a brain? What is consciousness, really? Where does one living thing end and another begin?
Crazy Organic chases those questions — the wondrous ones and the unanswered ones — and brings you along for the chase.
The latest issue is up top. Below is the rest of the journal — every issue so far, each claim labeled for what it is.
Fungi not as curiosities but as the machinery that keeps the planet running.
Every leaf you have ever seen is a building with tenants — more than twenty fungal species in a single tropical leaf, most of them unnamed. Some are inherited in the seed, most are caught from the air. Plus a grass that survives 65°C because of a virus inside a fungus inside it.
Read the issue →A lichen is a fungus and an alga living together — the answer that got its author ridiculed for twenty-five years, and that lichenologists are now arguing about again. Two partners, or three, or is counting the wrong move? Plus: after 150 years, nobody can reliably build one in a lab.
Read the issue →A root strips the soil it touches and then sits in its own shadow, because phosphorus moves too slowly to refill it. In one experiment the fungal threads foraged out to 11.7 cm and delivered about three-quarters of the phosphorus. Plus where the "wood wide web" story outran its evidence.
Read the issue →Half a billion years ago the land was bare rock and plants had no roots. What let them out of the water was a deal with fungi — minerals for sugar — that greened the planet and helped grind the first soil from stone. Plus the live argument over which fungi struck the first bargain.
Read the issue →A dead tree is a tower of locked-up carbon, and for the hardest part — lignin — only white-rot fungi hold the key. The story of rot as the other half of the carbon cycle, plus the contested idea that fungi's late arrival once built the coal age.
Read the issue →Single-species portraits from the kingdom's strangest edges.
A dung-loving fungus called the hat-thrower fires its spores with the highest acceleration ever measured in the living world — and aims for the light first.
Read the issue →A fungus marches a living ant to a precise spot, locks its jaws onto a leaf, and erupts from its head — and the strangest part is the one thing it leaves untouched: the brain.
Read the issue →Some rotting logs really do glow green in the dark — living, heatless foxfire. We've solved exactly how the fungi make light; why they bother is the part still genuinely up for grabs.
Read the issue →Black molds thrive inside the Chernobyl reactor and grow toward the radiation. The survival is real and astonishing; the popular claim that they "eat" radiation is a hypothesis we still can't confirm.
Read the issue →Inky caps don't rot into ink — they dissolve themselves on purpose, gill by gill. And "inky cap" was never really one mushroom.
Read the issue →Bird's-nest fungi never launch anything themselves. A falling raindrop does — aimed by a cup shaped with such precision that the spore packet flies about a meter and lassos the nearest twig.
Read the issue →Most mushrooms let the wind scatter their spores for free. Stinkhorns fired the wind — and built a smell engineered, molecule by molecule, to fool a fly into thinking it found a corpse.
Read the issue →A truffle buried its spores where no wind can reach them — so it built a smell to hire an animal to dig it up. Plus the boar-pheromone story about it that the evidence went on to contradict.
Read the issue →The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus across 2,385 acres of Oregon forest. Up close: the bootlace cords that let it walk through soil, and how you prove a thing you can't see is one individual.
Read the issue →The grounding pillar: the evidence, separated from the marketing.
A ~$30-billion aisle built on real fungi and hopeful marketing — what the evidence shows for turkey tail, lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, and chaga, each claim honestly labeled.
Read the issue →The mushroom sold for focus and memory rests on one genuinely exciting idea — that it makes nerve cells grow. We trace it back to the cells and mice it comes from, then check it against the small, mixed human evidence.
Read the issue →All six episodes, in reading order.
A 230-year-old filing error, the scientists who reopened the drawer, and why a mushroom turns out to be closer to you than to the plant it grows on.
Read the issue →Animals and fungi are each other's closest relatives. The molecular fingerprints that prove your gut feeling about mushrooms is exactly backwards.
Read the issue →A fungus has no mouth and no gut, yet it's one of the planet's most important eaters — how external digestion defines an entire kingdom.
Read the issue →Half a billion years ago life crawled onto bare rock — with fungal help, the leading idea goes. Plus the land's first giant, which may belong to a branch of life that no longer exists.
Read the issue →The biggest known organism on Earth is a fungus in Oregon, spread across ~3.7 square miles and mostly invisible — and it quietly breaks our definition of an individual.
Read the issue →We've named maybe one fungal species in twenty. An entire kingdom of life is still, mostly, unknown — and that gap is the whole story. The finale of Series A.
Read the issue →We ask big, bold questions — bigger than careful science writing usually risks. But we never dress a guess up as a fact to make the story land.
When something is established, we'll say so plainly. When it's contested, we'll show you both camps. When it's a gorgeous, unprovable idea, we'll call it that — and enjoy it anyway. The wonder is real precisely because the honesty is.
"We don't know yet" is one of our favorite sentences.
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