Word: farness
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When you're little, every birthday is a big one. But as you grow up, it's O.K. to let them get small. I have mixed feelings about how midlife birthdays, once easily waved at as they passed quietly by, have spun so far out of control, thanks to Facebook alerts and my generation's abiding commitment to our eternal youth...
...organic farm just outside Monterey, Calif., a super-eco building material is growing in dozens of darkened shipping containers. The farm is named Far West Fungi, and its rusting containers are full of all sorts of mushrooms--shiitake, reishi and pom-pom, to name a few. But Philip Ross, an artist, an inventor and a seriously obsessed amateur mycologist, isn't interested in the fancy caps we like to eat. What he's after are the fungi's thin, white rootlike fibers. Underground, they form a vast network called a mycelium. Far West Fungi's dirt-free hothouses pack...
...traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It's also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of mushroom. (Sorry, the homes in the fictional Smurf village don't count.) The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the 'shrooms into an archway 6 ft. (1.8 m) high and 6 ft. wide. Dubbed Mycotectural Alpha, it is currently on display at a gallery in Germany...
...material can easily serve as mulch in your garden. Ecovative's next product, Greensulate, will begin targeting the home-insulation market sometime next year. And according to Bayer's engineering tests, densely packed mycelium is strong enough to be used in place of wooden beams. "It's not so far-out," he says of Ross's art house. So could Bayer see himself growing a mushroom house and living in it? "Well"--he hesitates--"maybe we'd start with a doghouse...
...that 150,000 corpses have been interred in mass graves; tens of thousands more remain buried under debris. As aid organizations struggle to deliver emergency provisions to the ravaged disaster zone--the U.N.'s World Food Programme estimated it has fed hundreds of thousands of people but cautioned that far more were going hungry--President René Préval issued an appeal for 200,000 tents to house some of the more than 800,000 people rendered homeless. Préval, whose palace collapsed in the temblor, intends to move into one himself...