Instant Genius - Merlin Sheldrake: How have fungi shaped the world?

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

The fungal kingdom is vast, and yet much of it remains unknown to us – it’s estimated that only about 6 per cent of all fungal species have, so far, been described. But if fungi are all around us, why do we only know the names of a few? We might use yeast in baking, mushrooms in our cooking, or have been treated with penicillin, but biologist Merlin Sheldrake says there is much more wonder to be found in understanding our fungal friends better. His new book, Entangled Life, reveals the complexity of the fungal world. In it, he describes the fungal networks that connect trees and plants in something called the Wood Wide Web, and explains how fungi were crucial to the creation of the world we see around us today. We spoke to Merlin about this strange and wondrous lifeform. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] This podcast was supported by brilliant.org, helping people build quantitative skills in maths, science, and computer science with fun and challenging interactive explorations. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: The Urban Birder: What wildlife can city-dwellers see? Samantha Alger: What can we do to save the bees? Mark Miodownik: Are biodegradable plastics really better than traditional plastic? Neil Shubin: How do big changes in evolution happen? Mark Lynas: Could leaving nature to its own devices be the key to meeting the UK’s climate goals? Brad Lister: Are we facing an insect apocalypse? Neil Gemmell: The genetic hunt for the Loch Ness Monster Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And mycelium is analogous to the tree on which the apples grow. And you imagine how little we'd know about this apple tree, if all we saw of it were the apples that pushed their way through the ground once a year and the rest was underground. So fungi live most of their lives concealed from view, and mycelium is their main way of life. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant for BBC Science Focus magazine. The fungal kingdom is vast, and yet much of it remains unknown to us. It's estimated that only about 6% of all fungal species have so far been described. But if fungi are all around us, why do we only know the names of a few? We might use yeast and baking, mushrooms in our cooking, or have taken penicillin, but biologist Merlin Sheldrake says there is much more wonder to be found among our fungal friends. His new book, Entangled Life, reveals the complexity of the fungal world. In it, he describes the fungal networks that connect trees and plants in something called the wood-wide web, and explains how fungi are crucial to

the creation of the world we see around us today. Editorial assistant Amy Barrett spoke to Merlin about this strange and wondrous light form. At the moment, I'm talking about the book all the time, so I'm not actually doing active research at the moment because I'm busy on the book. promotion circuit. When did the book come out? The book came out on the third in England, but it came out in May in the States. Right. And what's the reception been like so far? It's been very encouraging. People seem to have an appetite for the subject, which is gratifying and wasn't something that I'd expected. Because the research into fungi is one of the most under-researched areas. Have they got that right? Yeah, we know very little about them. Relatively speaking, I mean, we still know a decent amount,

and there are plenty of fungal biologists. But compared to, say, our knowledge of plants or animals, we know very little. And why do you think that is? I think there are a few reasons. One is technological. It's only in the last few decades that technologies like DNA sequencing have been evented and have become widely applicable. And these technologies grant us access to fungal lives in a way we simply didn't have before. So we can grind up the DNA and a teaspoon of soil and we can work out who's there, which fungi are there. We can describe communities in different places. We can look at what those communities are doing. And this means that the subject of fungi is just opened to inquiry.

in a different way. And there's other reasons to, I think taxonomically, there's been an entrenched bias against fungi because they were considered to be plants until the 60s when they won their independence, taxonomically speaking. And so when you wanted to study fungi in the past, there wasn't a department of fungal sciences at university. You'd have to study it in the plant sciences department.

So it was occupying some dusty wing of plant sciences rather than being its own studies. So I think that meant that, no, that's restricted funds and it's restricted students and general expertise. So there's a few other possible reasons as well, but those are the main ones, I think. So really, as soon as, as recently as the 60s, that we didn't actually class them different parts? Well, they were considered fungi, but fungi themselves were considered to be a type of plant. So it fell broadly under the umbrella of botany. And so what actually makes that incorrect?

What is it about them that means that they're neither plant not animal? So when you look at the evolutionary tree, so the line of descent of which fungi are apart, they make up their own kingdom of life. So it's broad and busier categories, animal and plant, but a distinct kingdom. And they're unlike plants in the sense they don't photosynthesize. So photosynthesis being this metabolic miracle where plants are able to eat light and carbon dioxide from the air.

So they have to do what animals do, which is to find food in the world and digest it and absorb it. But they're somewhat more like plants that animals because most of them live in a sessile way. So they live embedded in their environments and have to grow places. They can't grow places in the same way that animals can with their twitchy muscular bodies. And how old are fungi as a kingdom? At the moment, the best estimates are just over a billion years. But that keeps changing, you know, depending on new fossil evidence comes to light. A new analysis of the genetics comes to light.

So there's a finding from 2.4 billion years ago in lava, of, you know, fossil organisms that look just like fungi. They have this same branched mycelial structure. And so these is a contentious finding because it would suggest that fungi had arisen many times earlier than what we currently think. But whether they are actual fungi or just a different kind of mycelial organism is in dispute. So we're not sure. But at least a billion. That word mycelial, what does that mean? So when we think of fungi, most people think of mushrooms, which are just the fruits of fungi. So most fungi live most of their lives as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium.

And mycelium is analogous to the tree on which the apples grow. And you imagine how little we know about this apple tree if all we saw of it were the apples that pushed their way through the ground once a year. and the rest was underground. So fungi live most of their lives concealed from view, and mycelium is their main way of life. So do all species produce mushrooms? No, very few do, relatively speaking. Within the fungal kingdom is enormously diverse. There's the best estimates of about 2.2 to 3.8 million species, of which we've described only about 6 to 8% of them. So we know only that much about the fungal kingdom, so we think. And so of those 3.8, 2.2 to 3.8 million, only about 20 to 30,000 produced mushrooms. So mushroom forming fungi are in the great minority.

And so if I'm out and I see a mushroom growing, that's a very small portion of the fungi, right? So how far could the my seal network be stretched underneath that mushroom that I'm seeing? Yes, so mycelium is like trees, which can vary enormously from sort of shrubby small trees to giant redwoods, sequoias. Mycelium too varies enormously. You have some fungi that form mycelium which lives as ephemeral puffs on specks of house dust and doesn't range very far. You have mycelial networks which are some of the largest organisms in the world, as one in Oregon that sprawls across 10 square kilometers and restens. somehow, how am I between two and eight thousand years old. So there's enormous diversity of lifestyle.

And underneath us, what are the fungi actually doing? All sorts of things. So one of the big ecological roles that fungi play is decomposes. So if fungi weren't decomposing the dead bodies of animals and plants, that what else would be piled kilometers deep in bodies. So a lot of what fungi do in the decompositional role is something we don't notice because we live in the space that decomposition lives behind. We see decomposition only by the emptiness which remains.

And so it's easy for us to take it for granted. But in fact, this decomposition, this fungal decomposition of wood and other rotting matter is a very significant part of the biogeochemical cycle. that swarm around the planet. So other worlds they play, they have symbiotic relationships with plants. So almost all plants depend on symbiotic fungi that live in their roots, which lace out into the soil and which supply the plant with nutrients, like minerals like nitrogen or phosphorus and water,

and also protect the plant from disease. And the plant, in exchange, feeds the fungi with, energy-containing compounds that it's made in photosynthesis, so sugars or lipids, for example. And this relationship is very ancient and really lies at the root of all recognizable life on land because the ancestors of plants would not have made it out of the water, wherein not for these alliances, these ancient alliances with their fungal partners. So that's another major role that these fungi underground will be playing. So they wouldn't have made it out of the water because they wouldn't have been able to take these nutrients from the soil themselves, have I got that right?

Yeah, so the ancestors of plants would have been freshwater algae, sort of puddles of photosynthetic tissue used to being stewing in a nutrient broth, a watery nutrient broth, which would have been their home. And as they washed up onto these soggy shores of lakes and rivers, they faced a new type of challenge. There was light and carbon dioxide in abundance, but to scavenge their nutrition from the ground was something you'd never have to do before. And fungi are masters at this kind of scavenging. And so at this point, the fungi and the algae sort of struck up a relationship, and the fungi would have behaved like the root system of these early plants. And in fact, plants didn't evolve roots for another 50 million years. So fungi behaved as plants' root systems for 50 million years until plants could evolve their own. And you've mentioned that you found, it's been found,

there was like a fungi-like creature in the larva. Is it that fungi can live in places where no other organism could survive? Yes, so you have fungi living in extreme environments, for sure. And there are other organisms that also live in extreme environments. There are various types. of bacteria or archaea, which are also very extremophilic. But fungi can live in unusual places in some ways because they form a lichens, which are a symbiotic organism made up of a fungal partner or several fungal partners and a photosynthetic partner or several photosynthetic partners. And lichens, you'll have seen them, those tufty, scaly organisms that co-fence posts

and roofs and gravestones and walls and tree trunks. And these lichens can live in extremely inhospitable places because the fungus and the photosynthetic partners, they form a kind of micro-ecosystem, a summary of life on earth, with the fungus doing this digesting and the photosynthetic organism doing the photosynthesis. And together they make a little biosphere

and can survive in the most unexpected places. So when a volcano throws up a new island in the Pacific Ocean, lichens are some of the first things to move in, and they can make a life on this bare, solid rock. The fungus can digest minerals from the rock, and the photosynthetic part that can make energy from sunlight. And so you'd find lichens on these very newly exposed surfaces. You'd also find them prospering as crusts

on a scorched ground of most deserts, where they stabilize the surface of deserts. So lichens are very fascinating creatures with very extreme tastes. And do you find any fungi in the sea? You do? Yes, you find relatively little is known about marine fungi, but there are fungi found in samples of sulfurous sediment taken from far below the surface of the ocean. and there are fungi that weave their way through coral reefs and live on the bodies of marine crustaceans amongst other places. That's amazing.

And for you personally, what is it like to be a researcher in looking at these fungi? Do you get to go and see them all over the place, or do you find that you're mostly combined to a lab? So when I was doing a lot of my work in Panama, in tropical forests in Panama, I was studying these relationships between plants and their symbiotic root fungi, or mycorrhizal fungi, as they're known. And I would be in the forest a lot. I would be taking samples in the forest. I had also experiments in greenhouses, growing plants with different types of fungus and seeing what happened to them. And then I was also being in the lab dealing with these samples. But then for writing the book, when I was writing the book, I travelled much more widely. And I went to visit lots of different people studying fungi from all sorts of points of view.

And from those excursions, I had a much broader range of experience, including, for example, truffle hunting in Italy with some very secretive truffle hunters who search for the very prize an elusive white truffle, which has never been cultivated and so it has to be found in the wild. What is different about truffles? What makes them so desirable? So, in some senses, because the truffles have made themselves desirable, because truffles are the underground fruiting body of certain types of fungi, of root fungi, mycorrhizal fungi. But underground, these truffles, these fruiting bodies, they're unavailable to wind currents that might spread their spores if they're a more conventional mushroom. And they are invisible to the eyes of

animals. And so they have to spread their spores. They produce these very amazing aromas, which can filter through the damp soil, travel through the air in the forest, and catch the attention of an animal who will then go out of its way to find a truffle, dig it up and eat it, and then carry its spores away and deposit them in its feces in some other place. So truffle, have made themselves attractive because their lives depend on it. And so you can think of these truffle aromas really as an evolutionary portraiting scent of animal fascination. And humans are part of that animal fascination, like shrews, squirrels, pigs, dogs, mice, everything else that eat truffles, we do too. And so some of these truffles, like the white truffle, have particularly

prized flavors. And so humans dig them up. have whole industries built around this. They have to be served on a plate within about 48 hours of picking, and they're finding them in the ground because their aroma is made by a living process. So you can't dry a truffle. So humans have developed special packing, chilled transportation systems, ways of rushing them through customs, getting them onto plates in other countries,

all within 48 hours or so. So we do a lot to design. disperse these organisms. In fact, we urgently disperse these organisms because their flavors are so attractive to us. Why is it that they can't be cultivated then? Some of them can. Some types of the Tiber Melanosporum or the Perigord black truffle. This can be cultivated to some degree. With some degree of success, the white truffle is very hard because we don't understand enough about how it forms relationships with its host trees. So you can get a host tree to to have this mycelium of this white truffle growing on its roots.

But when we plant that out in a natural environment, then it just won't fruit. So we don't understand what it is that this symbiosis needs in order to fruit. There are too many variables. We haven't got this in hand yet. So there are a number of, and it's mostly because we don't understand the sex life of these truffles. It's all about these different relationships, the travel relationship with the tree, the truffles relationship with other truffles of the opposite mating type.

So there's a cascade of relationships that humans are struggling to understand. Aside from the truffle, obviously we know of yeast, but are there any other fungal species that we interact with on a daily basis? East are a big one. We have yeast coating our body. We have yeast living inside us, aligning our orifices, a yeast to play a major role in human culture, baking and brewing being major examples. So, yes, so yeast are often underrated agent in a human life and the history of civilization. But apart from that, every time you interact with a plant,

where the time you eat it, you plant one, you buy one, there are fungi involved in that plant's life from the beginning until the moment that you eat it. Most plants have fungi living in their leaves and in their shoots as well as in their roots. And so plant life is also fungal life. And of course people eat. fungi for food, mushrooms, but then in the world of drugs, fungi play an enormously important role. So penicillin is a very famous story where a mold as part of its antibacterial defense system produced as compound penicillin, which humans were able to repurpose and use to defend ourselves

also from bacteria. But there are others besides. There's cyclosporin, which is a immunosuppressant drug, which makes organ transplants possible. And there's stancholids. And there's stancholors. Statins, the cholesterol-lowering statins. Taxol, the blockbuster anti-cancer drug. Acidocybin, the psychedelic, recently found to alleviate anxiety and depression. So there's a very long list of fungal or drugs derived from fungi, which really play a major role in society. But there are, of course, fungi that are dangerous to us and animals.

Yeah, there is some poisonous fungi, which means when you're foraging for fungi, if you are foraging for fungi, then you need to be very sure that what you're picking is, what you think it is. But there are, I mean, fungi have a reputation for being poisonous, which is perhaps disproportionate to the number of poisonous species that there are. But it is a very, you know, foraging for mushrooms, you do have to make sure that you know positively what you're eating, call a positive identification, rather than knowing that it's not that, that it's not that, you have to know that it is this.

So, but yes, so poisons is another thing that they do. And on foraging, what's different about the ones that we would go out and forage than the one that I might buy in the supermarket? So on the whole, supermarket mushrooms are a species called agaricus bisporous, and cremany mushrooms, the supermarket button mushrooms and portobella mushrooms, they're all the same species of mushroom just at different life stages. So it's a clever racket that has been developed to pass these off as actually different mushrooms

when they're just the same species at different points in its life cycle. So these mushrooms are some of the less nutritious and medicinal mushrooms around, but they're just very easy to grow. So they were some of the first that people were able to cultivate on a large scale. But there are many other types of mushroom which are also cultivatable,

which you can buy in different in shops and a growing number of supermarkets like Shittaki, Lions, Maine, oyster mushrooms. And these are more medicinal and more nutritious as well. So mushroom cultivation is really booming right now. And hopefully we see more and more diversity of mushrooms in our shops as this continues. And how far back in human history does our relationship with fungi go? Very far back. I mean, as long as we've defended on plants for our nutrition, we've also depended on fungi.

So that goes right back to long before humans were humans. But then there are lots of other examples of involvement of fungi in human history. There's a study that came out quite recently, which found analyzed the tooth plaque enamel of some Neanderthal skeletons. and one of these Neanderthals had had a tooth abscess judging by the state of its teeth. And this individual, not the others, had been eating an antibiotic-producing mould, which suggests the knowledge of its medicinal properties. This is 10 or thousands of years before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

So fungi and use in medicine stretches a long way back, as a fire starter as a way to hold fire, a kind of tinder and a coal holding material, a way to transport fire, has played a very important part as well. And as psychedelics in some cultures in Middle America and Mesoamerica, the use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms as a sacrament as a tool of a cultural tool of experiencing all sorts of non-ordinary states of consciousness, a mushroom stretch back to 3,000 years at least. So there's a long entanglement of human lives and fungal lives. It's not going to stop as well.

What does the feature look like for our relationship with fungi? There are all sorts of fascinating possibilities and fascinating realities happening really quite quickly. So some fungi produced these medicinal compounds. A mycologist called Paul Stamitz in America has found that antiviral compounds produced by certain species of fungi can help bees to overcome colony collapse disorder, which is a really major threat to all human life on the planet. and these bees, if you feed these bees with these medicinal extracts from fungi, then they live for much, much longer time. And so that's one avenue is a kind of medicinal wing of the medicinal mushroom story, but applied to bees.

There are other aspects of medicinal fungi that will play really important roles as anti-cancer drugs, antifirals, antibiotic, and immune supporting compounds is a huge and rapidly expanding field. And then as building materials, you can encourage my sedium to grow in damp, wood, sawdust, sort of ground corn stalks, agricultural waste, basically. You can create blocks or boards, a bit like wood composites. And these can be used in all sorts of places. is IKEA are re-envisaging their packaging as mycelial packaging.

At Dell, the computer company, already ship thousands of servers a year in mycelial packaging. A leather-like material made from fungal mycelium is picking up speed and sets to revolutionize, to accept to revolutionize the fashion industry. So these are really exciting possibilities and will help to disrupt some of the really polluting industries and use renewable materials in their place. And so these are just a few of the ways that humans are striking up new types of relationship with fungi. And on that, will climate change have any impact on fungi? Absolutely, yes.

So there will be a number of fungi which are... forced into very difficult situations because of climate change and the range shifts of host species, say they're host plant species. Some will adapt, some won't. And for example, as plants are forced to move up or down latitudes because of climate change, climate change, their fungal partners will either be able to make that journey with them or not if the plants aren't able to move themselves. Lots of fungi will thrive in disturbing. environments. So it was during the last major extinction, the one that wiped out the dinosaur from an asteroid hit modern-day Mexico. The blankets of ash that covered the planet killed off a lot

of the forests. And so this global compost heap was a fine breeding ground for all these decomposing fungi who had a kind of field day, a field period. When there was just a huge amount to decompose. So decomposes thrive in this kind of disturbed environment. Some fungi will not thrive in that kind of disturbed environment. So there are many ways to be a fungus and many ways for fungi to respond to global heating and environmental breakdown. So will fungi outlive us? Well, I would say almost certainly.

And do you ever see that there could be a world without fungi? it would not be recognizable to us certainly so if fungi if you wound back the if you look back in the history of life and imagined replaying the tape of the history of life without fungi as part of that story there would be life but it would be totally unrecognizable and we certainly wouldn't be here and so moving forwards it's very hard to imagine a world without fungi either. And for you, what would you say is so fascinating about fungi? Why have you chosen them to focus on? There are so many reasons.

I find that thinking about fungi makes the world look different, that these organisms have the power to change the way that we think and feel and imagine. For example, when you realize that underground between plants, there are these large networks through which all sorts of nutrients and materials, water and signals are passing, when you realize that the history of life is a history of symbiosis in which fungi had played major roles, then things start to look different. When I walk around outside, I experienced it differently, knowing that this is going on. So I found this very fascinating. And also fascinating because it helps me to understand these seething entangled networks, which really is how life works. So when you think about ecology, which is the relationships that form between organisms and their environments and organisms and other organisms, these fungal networks form literal, enduring, persistent connections between organisms.

And so they embody this basic principle of ecology. And so I find them really helpful organisms just to keep my attention there, keep my attention on the relationships between things and on the interconnectedness of these life forms. And so it helps me to keep the picture large and to avoid tunneling too rapidly into narrow and reductive stories. And fungi can actually help trees communicate between each other, is that right? Yes. So these networks that form, so the fungi that helped plants and the ancestors of plants out of the water 500 million years or so ago. And these plants, these fungi don't just form relationships with one plant. They're promiscuous. And so they can form relationships with more than one plant. And plants are also promiscuous and can form relationships with more than one type of phlegious. And plants can form relationships with more than one type of form. fungus. And the result is these overlapping shared fungal networks, shared between plants.

And as well as nutrients, which can pass through these networks, there have been very good studies that show that you can have signaling compounds passing between these plants. If you have two plants grown next to each other and they're either allowed to share a fungal network or they're not allowed to share a fungal network. And you expose one of those plants to aphids, which are a pest, and you don't expose the other plant to aphids. Then the plants that share a fungal network, then the second plants, if they share a fungal network,

will regulate its defensive responses, although it has not itself experienced the aphid attack, which indicates that somehow, through the network, information is passing. Exactly in what form this information is passing, we're not yet sure, but it's very clear that it does take place. That's amazing. So we find, you know, I think lots of us have been taken to gardening more recently than we might have done in the past.

Should we be considering the fungal composition of, you know, our soil, of my houseplants? Well, I mean, I personally find it helpful to do so. And in reality, in one's garden, there's probably, Most people probably aren't applying a huge number of chemicals and inorganic products, which would potentially disrupt the fungi. If you're going to spray your garden with fungicide, of course, that would really interfere with these symbiotic relationships that the plants need to survive. And that would be, if you're spraying your garden with fungicide,

then they need to find out about these symbiotic fungi, then maybe it would be helpful. Maybe you might choose to not spray the fungicide. on your plants and that could be when you make a difference. But I think probably for many people who are gardening, who aren't using these methods, there's probably not much that you would do differently

apart from really attend to the health of the soil. And compost, for example, is really good for these relationships rather than chemical and organic fertilizers. But just knowing that these plants that you can see growing in front of you are growing out of this relationship, that what you see is the outcome

of hundreds of millions years old relationship, that these plants are in fact algae which have evolved to farm fungi and fungi that have evolved to farm algae. This is a really big thought for me at least. Do you have a favourite species? Oh, no, I'm terrible at favourites, but it depends on the day of the week and the weather.

Today, I'd say my tarky, which are really beautiful, or hen of the woods, as they're sometimes known, I mean, they're very delicious mushrooms that are also quite medicinal. And so when I'm next out on a walk, in which ways can I look? What can I look for in order to appreciate the fungi that maybe I can't see? So you can look for mushrooms. That's one thing you can easily do.

And looking for mushrooms is something you sort of open your senses to. Sometimes you can just see them growing. But if you're really looking for them, you can walk slow. slowly, you can slightly blur your eyes to give you a bigger field of view. There are a few ways to, mushroom hands are described about getting their eyes on. I haven't got my eyes on yet, so I missed that. And so it's quite fun to try and drop into that state. And apart from mushrooms, there's lichens.

Likens are very common, and most of the time we pass over them without giving them a thought. But if you see lichens growing, and even better, if you look at lichens with a small hand lens, They become a world's total like continents on an unfamiliar atlas. It's astonishing to get lost in their forms and colours. So that's one way. Anytime you see a plant, you're seeing this, the outcome of this fungal association. Rotting, anything decomposing, rotting logs,

when you see fallen autumn leaves and you lift them up and you see where they're becoming soil, that frothing wilderness of decomposition and microbial activity. So there are all these different ways that we can learn to notice fungi. And if there's any life lessons that we can take from fungi, what would you say they would be? A fungi raise a lot of questions. So one question that they raise is to do with individuality.

We're used to thinking of ourselves as neatly bounded individuals. And fungi can make questions of some of the categories that we use to organize our lives. Given fungal network, a given piece of a given mycelial network, you can take any fragment of that, and it will turn into an entirely new mycelial network. And you can do that potentially forever. So under the right conditions, you can think about these fungi as immortal. But these fungal networks can also fuse other fungal networks, to make larger fungal networks.

And so where's one start and where does one stop? And where does, when you have a fungus living inside an insect and changing its behavior, which they do sometimes, then you have this astonishing fusion of a fungus with an animal and behaving in a new kind of way. And so lichens well, you know, these are composite organisms expressing themselves in ways that they would not do if they were growing alone. like the chemical elements of hydrogen and oxygen which come together to make water, which is completely unlike hydrogen or oxygen, both of them are explosive gases,

lichens come together to form these organisms which are completely unlike their constituent members. So these fungi playing games with individuality that really challenge us to think about how it is that we impose our categories and concepts on the world. Merlin Sheldrake talking about the immeasurable importance of fungi. The October issue of BBC Science Focus magazine reveals how to keep your mind healthy in a world of uncertainty. We speak to the world's first slime-mould astrophysicist and take a closer look at the news of signs of life in the clouds of Venus. Of course, there are loads more science stories inside and available on sciencefocus.com. If you like what you've just listened to,

then please leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision.

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