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The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World

Recently, I was watching the German drama "Population", the sci-fi theme and Takuya Kimura, basically irresistible. There is a segment that makes the scalp tingle.

A French chef bought a large amount of fresh lobster from the seafood market. During the processing, a lobster exploded by itself on the spot, spraying juice all over the chef's face. Soon the chef died on the street, and people who had been in contact with the lobster died one after another. The bad news continued. The lobster waste was disposed of as garbage and entered the water supply system. The plague broke out in French cities. Some doctors found that all infected people died of a type of Vibrio vulnificus. Normally, there are Vibrio-killing cells in human blood. Only this time, Vibrio will destroy the blood cells at an astonishing speed. They collectively mutated.

Watching Vibrio vulnificus happily devour blood cells, fear runs through the whole body like an electric current.

According to conservative estimates by experts, there are about 1.5 million species of fungi in the world, and about 120,000 species are currently known to humans.

There are many kinds of fungi with different shapes and colorful forms. For example, moldy fruits, cloud-like structures on rotting tree trunks, mushrooms on the ground, Cordyceps, white fungus, and ganoderma in plateau areas...the size of fungi varies greatly. Yeast, which is used to make pasta, is a single-celled organism, so tiny that it is invisible to the naked eye. Some mushrooms are very huge, the longest can be half the height of a person.

The documentary "Kingdom of Fungi" is really slowly unfolding a picture scroll with colorful and rich lines. The three-year journey of fungal exploration also interviewed professors and scholars from the world's top universities such as Oxford University, the Royal Botanic Gardens, and other well-known universities and associations, making this film very audio-visual.

"Kingdom of Fungi" poster

Which fungi are edible? What fungi are poisonous? Why do scientists now believe that fungi are absolutely essential to life on Earth? Why do you say there would be no forest without fungi?

Photographer Stephen leads fungi lovers all over the world on a mushroom hunting trip, revealing a mysterious mushroom kingdom for everyone. This photographer is well-known in the field of fungi photography. He has traveled all over the world and searched for thousands of beautiful fungi that you have never seen before. You will find that nature is so amazing and it breeds such wonderful creatures.

Fungi can parasitize animals and plants, thereby causing diseases, and parasitizing humans can cause diseases. Fungi can live in symbiosis with algae, and we give it a special name "lichen". Fungi and algae are closely combined to form a symbiont. The algae provide the nutrients needed by the fungi, and the secretions of the fungi can make the algae grow. They are mutualistic symbiosis. Fungi can also live in symbiosis with plants, forming mycorrhizae, which help the roots better obtain nutrients from the environment.

"Kingdom of Fungi" stills

Fungi have made great contributions to human and scientific development. When British scientist Fleming was cultivating bacteria, the petri dish was contaminated by fungi. "The fungus produced anti-biotic substances that inhibited the growth of bacteria and produced an inhibition zone. Fleming therefore discovered penicillin. Penicillin cannot be underestimated. After its discovery, the average human life expectancy was extended by 20 years. Later, cephalosporins were discovered one after another. Some drugs, such as Griseofulvin, Griseofulvin, Ergot, Carotene, Riboflavin, etc., are all produced by fungi.

In addition to being used for brewing, fungi have other uses in industry. For example, degumming of flax, desizing of fabrics, paper industry, leather industry, glycerin fermentation, production of organic acids, food fermentation, etc. are inseparable fungus. Because fungi can secrete pectinase, amylase, protease and other enzymes, they play a very important role in industry.

"Kingdom of Fungi" stills

Professor Lynn Bodie said: "Fungi are neither plants nor animals and have been around since the dawn of life. They feed on rocks and prepare the soil for plants to grow. This in turn changes the atmospheric conditions and triggers the growth of animals. Evolution. Fungi inherited the world after the last mass extinction event and brought the planet back to life, and fungi even paved the way for civilization—it made us who we are.”

"Kingdom of Fungi" stills

One-sentence comment: Fungi are ever-changing and ubiquitous, and they appear at every amazing node in history.

Chaos Caught On Camera

Disasters can strike the globe anytime, anywhere. You never know if you are the lucky survivor.

A Moment of Reality is a documentary produced by Discovery Channel that aired in April 2015. The show reveals the stories behind some of the shocking, never-before-seen footage captured in these real-life disaster films.

Harrison was working on the Jesken IV tugboat, which was 34 meters long and had 12 crew members. An accident happened on this day. The ship had an accident, and seawater flooded into the wrecked cabin, trapping all 12 crew members. , Harrison fled to the captain's cabin at the top, the water pressure stopped the flow and created an air pocket for him.

Screenshot of "A Moment of Reality"

Thirty meters underwater, in the darkness, Harrison was waiting to die. The air was only available for him to survive for 15 hours, but Harrison struggled for 62 hours. The next problem is hypothermia. Water at 16 degrees will cause hypothermia within 90 minutes and make people lose consciousness within two hours. The next step is dehydration. Fortunately, he found a can of soft drink. After being found by the rescuers, he had to go deep diving immediately. The distance of several meters was also a huge challenge. As expected, he just got out of the cabin. Passed out, "I'm going to have a heart attack!" In just a few minutes, the divers tried their best to send him to the bell-shaped diving chamber. After that, Harrison never went into the water again, and he has been cooking on land.

Screenshot of "A Moment of Reality"

A massive explosion at a fertilizer plant flattened four city blocks and killed 15 people, including 11 firefighters and two volunteers. A nursing home and a school were destroyed. There are 34 tons of ammonium nitrate in the fertilizer plant, which is a very safe compound, but it is another matter if it is overheated in a limited space. When this compound reaches 300 degrees Celsius, it will immediately decompose into nitrogen, water and a large amount of water. Oxygen, since there is no room for these products, they will explode outward, faster than the speed of sound, the oxygen fuels the fire of the fireball, engulfing the adjacent place, and the shock wave sends a ring of pressurized gas, rushing in all directions...

One-sentence comment: The real version of "Death is Coming", if you watch it carefully, you may learn survival skills and various knowledge points. According to the theory of causality, it is not God and Buddha who rescue you, but a casual accident of yourself thought.

Our Lives: Extraordinary People

A few days ago, I saw a girl who could only survive with a nasal feeding tube. She had a thin body but a smile was still on her face. She also loved painting. There was a painting with a hand on the sea. I asked her what it meant, and she said It is calling for help or waving, and it is also saying goodbye to this world. Looking at her talking and laughing, you still don't want to believe that this is a patient with a rare disease who will pass away at any time.

A child who always sleeps in class may have narcolepsy, a child who can eat all the food in the refrigerator in one sitting may have Fat-Willi syndrome, and a person who is painless and sweatless may have narcolepsy. Congenital painless anhidrosis, these people and these things are inseparable from a disease - a rare disease.

In real life, albinism, phenylketonuria, hemophilia, mitochondrial disease... the names of these diseases, I believe most people have heard of or even encountered them when they were growing up. In recent years, as the country and the media pay more and more attention, "mermaid baby" (leg deformity), "porcelain doll" (osteogenesis imperfecta), "marionette man" (multiple sclerosis) and so on have been endowed with poetic meanings. The disease code name is also becoming more and more known to the public.

At present, there are about 7,000 rare diseases confirmed worldwide, accounting for about 10% of human diseases, 80% of which are genetic diseases, and most rare diseases are caused by gene defects. Today, there are about 350 million rare disease patients in the world, and the number of rare disease patients in my country exceeds 20 million.

The British documentary Our Lives: Rare Populations follows three groups of people with rare diseases from around the world.

A pair of "solar boys" from Pakistan.

As soon as the sun went down, they were completely paralyzed. They couldn't even speak, they couldn't move their bodies, and they needed other people's care. In the morning they were back to normal, as if nothing had happened last night. My father tried to find a way to seek medical advice for them, but he couldn't find out why. The imam said that it may be that the demon possessed to help them exorcise the demon, and there was no miraculous effect. Until they were discovered by media reporters and they were taken to a big hospital for examination, they still did not get an answer.

solar boy

In Pakistan, solar panels are so popular that they are called "solar boys". They are probably the only people in the world with this condition.

rare disease

In addition, the documentary also introduces a British girl who was "stolen of youth". She is only 20 years old, but she has a 60-year-old face; the world's heaviest boy from Indonesia - weighing more than 190 kg, almost Make it hard for him to move. These people have been driven to the end of their lives because of various diseases that are rare in the world.

The documentary will reveal the daily life of these special people and their unremitting struggle against their own destiny through follow-up interviews with them.

One-sentence comment: Some people work hard to live, as if they are completing an impossible task!

Dark Net

Have you ever thought about it, the server knows you better than your mother, it has witnessed everything, what you eat every Sunday, your ex and current, your hobbies, and even your nakedness. Everything is captured and preserved.

Probably everyone has been asked such a requirement:

2% of apps want to get your browsing history

14% of apps want to get your phone photo album

43% of apps want to know your location

62% of apps want to capture usernames and passwords

Unless you don't go online, you can hardly escape these data collections.

The documentary "Dark Net" reveals such a hidden world for us, it exists in the world, and it seems to float in a different space like a ghost, making you shudder. "Dark Web" is a series launched by Showtime in 2016 and 2017. In the two seasons, a large number of facts were listed and discussed the negative impact of technology and the Internet. For example, SM dating sites, revenge porn sites, virtual girlfriends, cyber violence, human body implants, minors addicted to watching movies, Internet pornography for Filipino children, and online cults that instigate girls to run away from home, etc. Topics covered drugs, hired murder, BDSM and pedophilia.

"Darknet" poster

The focus of the dark web is "dark", which belongs to the black market on the Internet. There are many things related to violence, pornography, and black products, such as arms, fake passports, credit cards, user information, 0day, etc. Most of the conspiracy theory-related articles on the Internet also start from dark spots such as the dark web, and create divergent creations. According to the relevant data in the Dark web on Wiki, the top three dark web sites are Drugs, Market, and Fraud, that is, drugs, transactions, and fraud.

Among them, the dark web can also see positive parts, such as cyber amateur detectives, who hope to help victims’ families get justice on the dark web, as well as cyber inspectors, who predict crimes that induce sexual assault in advance, and strange hackers Lawyers, because "the punishment for cybercrime is much heavier than that of ordinary crimes. This issue is related to the US Congress. The general members of Congress are all white men in their sixties, seventies, or even a hundred years old. They are afraid of death." Hackers, after all people are afraid of what they don't know."

In order to stop the child pornography industry, online virtual children have emerged as the times require. Does this prevent crime or encourage crime? No one can tell.

"Dark Web" stills

One sentence comment: People who live in the dark all year round will always think——

1. I don't have the value of being united, and I can only go one way to black;

2. I am a weak person, unable to adapt to the era of great changes;

3. Because I am too scared, I am not afraid of anything.