This Fungus EATS Radiation — And Scientists Want to Send It to Mars

In the deadliest place on Earth, where radiation can kill you in minutes, scientists found something growing on the walls — and it wasn't dying… it was thriving.

READ or SHARE: https://weirddarkness.com/chernobyl-fungus-eats-radiation/

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.
#WeirdDarkness #Chernobyl #Nuclear #Radiation #Science #Fungus #NASA #Space #Mystery #StrangeScience

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
In the deadliest place on Earth, where radiation can kill
you in minutes, scientists found something growing on the walls
and it wasn't dying. It was thriving. I'm Darren Marler,

(00:23):
and this is weird dark news. There are places on
this planet where life simply isn't supposed to exist, places
so hostile, so fundamentally incompatible with biology that even bacteria
struggle to survive. And yet, as we've learned time and again,
life is a peculiar habit of showing up precisely where

(00:43):
we least expect it and doing things that make scientists
scratch their heads and question everything they thought they knew.
All right, let's set the scene here, because context matters.
On April twenty sixth, nineteen eighty six, a routine safety
test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plants reactor for went
catastrophically wrong. Now catastrophically wrong might be the understatement of

(01:07):
the century. The resulting explosions sent a fireball of radioactive
material into the atmosphere and created what remains the worst
nuclear disaster in human history. The Soviet authorities eventually established
a nineteen mile exclusion zone around the site, a dead
zone covering sixteen hundred square miles, where radiation levels were

(01:29):
so high that simply existing there was a death sentence.
And for a while, that's exactly what it looked like,
a dead zone. No humans, no animals, just silence and
the slow decay of an abandoned city. But then something
weird started happening. Fast forward to nineteen ninety one, just
five years after the disaster, and a team of Ukrainian

(01:53):
scientists led by microbiologist to Nellishad Noova did something most
people would consider certifiably insane. They went inside the destroyed reactor.
Not for long, mind you. As researcher tatianatu Gui later
explained it, it was only possible to be near the
reactor for very short periods of time. They grabbed samples
as quickly as possible and got out. What they found

(02:16):
on those walls should not have been there. The interior
of reactor, for one of the most radioactive places on Earth,
was turning black, not from ash or decay, but from
something alive, something growing. Sure, some mold survived the radiation.
Mildly interesting, right, Except the story doesn't end there. Over

(02:38):
dozens of visits throughout the nineteen nineties, Ghanovah's team documented
in astonishing thirty seven different species of fungi living in
and around the reactor. And these weren't just survivors clinging
to existence in a harsh environment. These fungi were rich
in melanin, the same pigment that gives color to human
skin and hair, and they seemed to be genuine thriving.

(03:01):
So what's so special about melanin? While in humans, melanin
protects our skin from ultraviolet radiation, It's why people living
closer to the equator developed darker skin over generations, more melanin,
more protection from the sun. But for these fung guy,
melanin appeared to be doing something far more extraordinary than
just shielding them from radiation. It seemed to be helping

(03:24):
them eat it eat radiation. Come on, I get this skepticism.
This sounds like the opening act of a B movie
horror film. But let's look at what the science actually shows.
Radio pharmacologist Ekatarita Dotakova and immunologist Arturocacdovol at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine decided to investigate these bizarre organisms

(03:46):
in proper laboratory conditions. In two thousand and seven. They
exposed melanized fungui, including strains similar to those found at chernobyl,
to radioactive caesium. What they discovered was genuinely strange. The
irradiate fungi grew about ten percent faster than identical samples
not exposed to radiation. That alone would be remarkable, but

(04:09):
that a. Covia's team went further. They found that within
just twenty to forty minutes of radiation exposure, the fung
gui rapidly altered the chemical properties of their melanin. The
melanin became more efficient at transferring electrons, essentially becoming charged
up by the radiation. That a Cova proposed a term
for what these fung guy might be doing, radiosynthesis. The

(04:32):
idea is that melanin could be acting like chlorophyll in plants,
but instead of capturing energy from sunlight, it's harvesting energy
from ionizing radiation. Now, before we get too excited, let
me pump the brakes a little. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,
and we're not quite there yet. As of today, scientists

(04:53):
have not been able to demonstrate definitive carbon fixation dependent
on ionizing radiation or A or a metabolic pathway showing
exactly how this energy conversion works. Engineer nile Z e
Verischev Stanford University has been blunt about this, saying actual
radiosynthesis remains to be shown, so what we're looking at

(05:14):
is a well supported but still incomplete hypothesis. The fung
gui definitely grows better when exposed to radiation, the melanin
definitely changes in measurable ways, but the complete biochemical story
that's still being written. Still what we do know is fascinating.
Doctor Joshua Nousanchuk at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine

(05:37):
summed it up nicely. Fungui have been through numerous challenging
environmental boot camps since time began, and they've developed some
truly remarkable survival abilities along the way. Eating radiation, he suggests,
is just one such adaptation that certain melanin producing fung
gui developed. The fungal process of energy conversion is similar

(05:57):
to photosynthesis, just with a different power. The practical applications
of this are also worth considering. Science fiction movies about
astronauts traveling to Mars often show them grappling with the
problem of cosmic radiation. It's not dramatic. There are no
explosions or monster attacks, unfortunately, but it's one of the
biggest genuine challenges facing human space exploration. Beyond Earth's protective

(06:22):
magnetic field, astronauts are bombarded by galactic cosmic radiation high
speed charged particles from exploding stars that increase the risk
of radiation sickness, and cancer. Traditional shielding solutions involve heavy metals,
which are expensive and difficult to launch into space. Every
extra pound you send up costs thousands of dollars, So naturally,

(06:44):
some clever researchers looked at these radiation loving fungi and thought, hey,
what if we could use these as living shields. In
twenty twenty two, scientists sent samples of claudisphorium speraspurtum, the
same species dominating Shore Nobel's radioactive environment, to the International
Space Station. The experiment ran for about thirty days, monitoring

(07:06):
the fungus's growth and its ability to block cosmic radiation,
and the results were promising. The fungus grew about twenty
one percent faster in space than the ground control samples,
and a thin layer just one point seven millimeters thick
reduced radiation by roughly two percent compared to the control
two percent might not sound like much. The advantage, though,

(07:28):
is that these fungi are self replicating. They can grow,
repair themselves, and potentially be cultivated on site using local resources.
NASA astrobiologist Lynjay Rothschild has proposed something called mico architecture,
essentially growing fungal walls on the Moon or Mars that
would service both structural elements and self regenerating radiation shields.

(07:53):
Imagine building a luiar base where the walls literally grow
themselves and protect you from cosmic rays at the same time.
That's not science fiction anymore. It's an actual research direction
being actively pursued. Back on Earth. Researchers are also exploring
whether these fungi could help clean up radioactive contamination. Some species,

(08:14):
like Aspergillus niger and Pisolomeces jevannicus could transform highly mobile
uranium into stable, insoluble minerals, essentially locking dangerous radioactive material
in place and preventing it from spreading through groundwater or
being absorbed by plants. The potential applications for nuclear disaster
sites like Fukushima are obvious. Instead of dangerous, expensive human

(08:37):
lead cleanup operations, you might someday be able to deploy
fungal colonies that actively seek out and neutralize radioactive contamination.
It sounds like a monster movie pitch, doesn't it the
fungus that ate Fukushima? But it's grounded in real science.
Of course, we're still in the early stages of understanding
these organisms. Not all melanized fungi exhibit this radiation loving behavior.

(09:00):
Platusphorium platosporioids, for instance, increases melanin production when exposed to radiation,
but doesn't actually grow faster. The behavior we see in
Cherynoble's dominant species appears to be something special, not universal
to all dark pigmented fungi, and the complete mechanism still
remains elusive. Is radiosynthesis truly analogous to photosynthesis with a

(09:22):
step by step energy conversion pathway, or is it more
of a stress response that just happens to enhance survival.
Scientists are still working that out. What we do know
for certain is this deep inside one of the deadliest
places on Earth, in an environment that can kill a
human in minutes, these humble black fungi are not just thriving,

(09:43):
They're flourishing, They're growing toward radiation sources, like plants grow
towards sunlight. They're doing something with that deadly energy that
allows them to thrive where nothing else can. Jeff Goldblum
was right, and always has been. Life finds a way,
Life adapts. It always has, and sometimes it adapts to
ways that completely upend our understanding of what's possible. Nearly

(10:07):
four decades after the Chernoble disaster, the fungus is still there,
still growing, still doing whatever mysterious thing it does with
all that radiation, and if everything goes according to plan,
its descendants might someday be protecting astronauts on Mars biological
shields grown from the offspring of organisms that learn to
feast on one of the most destructive forces known to humanity.

(10:29):
Not bad for a little black mold. I still think
we should make that fungus monster movie though. If you
like to read this story for yourself or share the
article with a friend, you can read it on the
Weird Darkness website. I've placed a link to it in
the episode description, and you can find more stories of
the paranormal, true crime, strange and more, including numerous stories
that never make it to the podcast. In my Weird

(10:49):
Darknews blog at Weird Darkness dot com. Slash news