Nachrichten aus der Welt der Pilze

[Waaagh]

Ich hätte ja gern mehr infos zu dem neuen Karbolegerling.
Den Omphalotus könnte man mit ner uv lampe ganz einfach unterscheiden werden von Cantharellus cibarius
Dank der mega coolen Luciferase

[Waaagh]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/1 ... 1117731279

Psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type
experience in combination with
meditation and other spiritual practices
produces enduring positive changes in
psychological functioning and in trait measures
of prosocial attitudes and behaviors

bestätigt die bisherigen Ergebnisse
Und macht echt Mut

[harekrishnaharerama]

Ich hätte ja gern mehr infos zu dem neuen Karbolegerling.
Den Omphalotus könnte man mit ner uv lampe ganz einfach unterscheiden werden von Cantharellus cibarius
Dank der mega coolen Luciferase

Meinst Du den hier:

[Waaagh]

ja das ist der "alte" bisher bekannte Karbolegerling der anläuft.
Der neue soll das nicht machen, und ist deswegen kaum mehr zu unterscheiden.

[harekrishnaharerama]

Und der stinkt auch nicht mehr?

[Corto]

Und der stinkt auch nicht mehr?

Nein der stinkt nicht mehr weswegen der so gefährlich ist. Die Experten können ihn deshalb nicht mehr vom gewöhnlichen Karbolegerling unterscheiden.

[Corto]

Nein der stinkt nicht mehr weswegen der so gefährlich ist. Die Experten können ihn deshalb nicht mehr vom gewöhnlichen Karbolegerling unterscheiden.

[Zebra]

Billion-year-old fossils set back evolution of earliest fungi

Microscopic specimens discovered in the Canadian Arctic are surprisingly intricate.


Minute fossils pulled from remote Arctic Canada could push back the first known appearance of fungi to about one billion years ago — more than 500 million years earlier than scientists had expected.
These ur-fungi, described on 22 May in Nature1, are microscopic and surprisingly intricate, with filament-like structures. Chemical analyses suggest that the fossils contain chitin, a compound found in fungal cell walls.
If that analysis holds up, it could reshape understanding of how fungi evolved and whether they might have facilitated the movement of plants onto land. But some researchers are not yet convinced that the finding is truly a fungus. “It looks to me as if there’s reason for believing it’s real at this point,” says Mary Berbee, a mycologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “But more data would be really useful.”

Palaeobiologist Corentin Loron at the University of Liège, Belgium, and his colleagues found the fossils while exploring a region of Arctic Canada called the Grassy Bay Formation.
The team had to travel to the study site, nestled amid the area's dramatic cliffs, by helicopter. Because the rocks there formed without exposure to high temperatures and pressures, the fossils within them are remarkably preserved, says palaeobiologist Emmanuelle Javaux, Loron’s adviser at the University of Liège.
From there, the team painstakingly sectioned the fossils into thin sheets that could be analysed with an electron microscope. Those images revealed branched filaments ending in spheres. The filaments were divided into segments by septae, walls that are found in some modern fungi.

A fungus among us?

The fossils were discovered in billion-year-old rock, and the presence of chitin in the specimens further persuaded the researchers that they were preserved fungi that died a billion years ago. The team named the fungus Ourasphaira giraldae.
But the researchers’ interpretation of their chemical analysis troubles Sylvain Bernard, a geochemist at the Institute of Mineralogy, Physics of Materials and Cosmochemistry in Paris. The presence of many organic molecules could produce similar results, he says, and the findings from the chemical analysis also suggested the presence of molecules not typically found in chitin. “These data do not show that these microfossils originally contained chitin.”
Loron counters that the samples could have contained chitin and other organic compounds. He also points to the presence of chemical signals characteristic of chitin, and chitin-like fibres on the fossil surface. “Our results are most consistent with chitin,” he says.

The team’s findings also match molecular studies that use the rate at which DNA changes accumulate in fungi to calculate when they first appeared, Javaux says. These ‘molecular clock’ analyses had already placed the origin of the fungi back to about one billion years. But palaeobiologist Christine Strullu-Derrien of the Natural History Museum in London says that previous molecular analyses have suggested that the only fungi living one billion years ago were simple, single-celled creatures — and did not possess the more complex, filamented structures seen in the fossils.
Nevertheless, she is hopeful that further study will confirm that the fossils contain chitin. “I would like to believe it,” she says. “That makes an important finding in the world — if it is really a fungus.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01629-1

[Zebra]

Psilocybin increases self-transcendence among meditators


There are certain similarities between the increased awareness associated with the practice of mindfulness and the expanded consciousness associated with the use of psychedelic substances. Both are capable of promoting states of self-transcendence in which the boundary between one’s self and the world is erased, leading to a boundless sense of connection with the universe.

Smigielski et al. [Neuroimage] experimentally tested the effects of psilocybin, a psychedelic mushroom plant derivative, on self-reported, neurological, and behavioral outcomes among experienced meditators attending a meditation retreat.
The researchers randomly assigned 38 experienced meditators (average meditation experience = 5,000 hours; 61% male; average age = 52 years) on a five-day Zen meditation retreat to a psilocybin or placebo control condition. On the morning of the fourth retreat day, participants were administered either psilocybin (315 μgs/kg) or a placebo (lactose), and continued on with the regular retreat schedule. The research participants and assessors were blinded to the study group assignment.
Six hours after psilocybin or placebo administration, participants completed a questionnaire measuring psychological factors such as “oceanic self-boundlessness,” “dread of ego dissolution,” visual and auditory hallucinations, synesthesia, and “vigilance reduction.”

On the day before and after the retreat, participants underwent brain imaging (fMRI) to measure functional connectivity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) while resting, while engaging in focused attention meditation, and while engaging in open awareness meditation. The DMN is a network of brain regions that operates collectively when a person is simply resting and “doing nothing.”
DMN activity has been implicated in self-referential thinking, maintaining a unitary sense of identity, and maintaining the self-other boundary. Functional connectivity is a measure of the degree to which different brain regions are operationally integrated and display similar patterns of activation.

Four months after the retreat, participants completed a self-report measure of changes in attitudes towards self and the world, as well as changes in mood, social functioning, behavior, and spirituality.
The fMRI results showed that the psilocybin group displayed a significantly greater decrease in functional connectivity between two parts of the DMN—the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—from pre- to post-test while engaging in open awareness meditation than did the placebo group. Greater decreases in functional connectivity between these brain structures were strongly associated with more profound experiences of oceanic self-boundlessness during drug administration (r = -.60).

Four months later, the psilocybin group reported significantly more positive changes in attitude, mood, and behavior (2.58 points on a 6-point global positive effects scale) than did controls (0.65 points). These persisting positive effects correlated with the magnitude of oceanic self-boundlessness experienced during drug administration (r = .66).
Positive changes in attitude, mood, social functioning, behavior, and spirituality were associated with pre-to-post increases in connectivity between the mPFC and PCC while at rest, as well as with decreases between the mPFC and the right angular gyrus during focused attention. There were no adverse effects reported in either group.

This study shows that experienced meditators’ psilocybin-induced self-transcendent experiences are associated with a persistent improvement in their psychological sense of well-being. These self-transcendent experiences are also associated with functional changes in the brain which point to the DMN’s critical role in both self-reference and self-transcendence.
The study is limited by its small sample size. The researchers caution that the results may only apply to experienced meditators, a cohort that has engaged in extensive mental training. The study did not track the persistence of DMN functional connectivity changes in the follow-up period.


https://goamra.org/psilocybin-increases ... editators/

[Corto]

The Denver Post
A mushroom cultivator agreed to show us his process of growing psilocybin mushrooms on the condition of anonymity. He has been growing mushrooms in his apartment for a little over a year. He talked with us about what it's like to take mushrooms, how he grows them and what he thinks about Denver voting to decimalize possession of psilocybin mushrooms.

Video by Amy Brothers, The Denver Post

Die Denver Post ist eine Tageszeitung und Website, die seit 1892 im Raum Denver, Colorado, veröffentlicht wird.