Mario fans, make your own 1UP Mushroom Burger with tips from momo! at Instructables. This particular burger has a veggie mushroom patty, but you can get the same effect with meat. The spots on the bun are mozzarella cheese! Link -via Laughing Squid

Thomas Beg animated the Lifecycle of a Mushroom for the Spectacular Science collaboration project in the style of the cartoons of the 1920s. Link -via Dangerous Minds

To catch the green glow of the bioluminescent mushroom, Desjardin and his long-time research partner in Brazil, Dr. Cassius Stevani, had to “go out on new moon nights and stumble around in the forest, running into trees,” he recalled, wary of nearby poisonous snakes and prowling jaguars.

But he said advances such as digital cameras have made it easier to track down bioluminescent fungi. New cameras allow researchers to photograph mushrooms that they suspect might be bioluminescent in darkened rooms and analyze the photos for a glow (sometimes one that’s not visible to the human eye) within a few minutes, compared to the 30 to 40 minutes required of regular film exposure.

The brave mycologists brought back photographs of the same mushroom, now renamed Neonothopanus gardneri. Read more about it at Science Daily. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Cassius V. Stevani/IQ-USP, Brazil)

Scientists found a new species of fungus that "lives in the rain forest, under a tree" and looks just like a sea sponge, so naturally they named it after SpongeBob SquarePants:

Shaped like a sea sponge, the bright orange (and sometimes purple) mushroom, Spongiforma squarepantsii, was discovered in the forests of Sarawak, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo in 2010, and just described in May in the journal Mycologia.

The fungus has a particular odor, smelling "vaguely fruity or strongly musty," according to Dennis Desjardin of San Francisco State University.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Neat Facts About SpongeBob SquarePants

Sounds like nonsense? Not so fast: scientists have discovered that electricity does make some species of mushroom multiply.

As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply.

The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods.

"We have tried these experiments with ten types of mushroom so far and have found that it is effective in eight species," said Koichi Takaki, an associate professor in engineering at Iwate University.

"We saw the best effects in shiitake and nameko mushrooms, while we also tested reishi mushrooms, which are not edible but are used in certain types of traditional Chinese medicine," he said.

Link

This infographic, titled Species-scape, purports to show various species at sizes relative to the number of known species in that group. Insects, represented by the fly, is the largest (at about 900,000 known species). If you’re wondering where we are, humans (and other mammals) are represented by the reindeer underneath the mushroom.

Link via Cool Infographics

One day, Fendy Sutandio of Orimath blog looked at his garden and found this strange "Zombie Hand" fungus. It does look like a zombie’s hand digging itself out of its grave!

Link – via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival