back to article Boffins go to FUNGI town: Riddle of 100-year-old HAIRY, ICY dead wood finally cracked

Strange "hair ice" found sprouting on old wood has finally been explained by scientists: it's caused by fungi. For nearly a century, boffins have been baffled by the odd hairy phenomenon. It grows on dead wood during humid winter nights when air temperatures fall a little below zero degrees centigrade. A crack team of …

  1. AceRimmer1980
    IT Angle

    Frozen hair ice?

    Let it grow.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Frozen hair ice?

      Bastard! I hoped never to hear that fscking song again and now you've got it rattling around my head!

  2. Lostintranslation

    The beauty of nature reduced to eighteen boring paragraphs by a scientist with nothing better to do.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I suspect I never shall understand the mentality that adding to our understanding of the world somehow subtracts from its beauty.

      1. P. Lee

        > suspect I never shall understand the mentality that adding to our understanding of the world somehow subtracts from its beauty.

        I'm not sure that was the meaning. I understood it to merely mean that the textual description and scientific understanding of the phenomenon brings comparatively little joy and wonder when compared with its observation.

        I suspect a personality difference. For me, I'm glad the scientific discovery prompted the publication of the visuals.

    2. LaeMing
      FAIL

      And then reduced to a boring 17 words by an even more boring person with nothing better to do (with their entire pointless existence from birth to grave).

    3. PleebSmash
      FAIL

      @Wonintranslation

      You just won the Rotting Wooden Twig of Fail.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Definitely lost in translation

      Wordsworth once held a dinner party to celebrate the fact that even after scientists worked out what caused rainbows, they were still beautiful.

      And the image in this story is still beautiful after I read it.

  3. Mage Silver badge

    Next ...

    It will be used as a stabiliser for ice cream to stop it either setting like concrete or growing gravel like crystals.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Childcatcher

      Re: Next ...

      As I'm eating ice cream (dairy free but close enough) right this second... I can think of a few tasty options for this data. But my dairy free version is as soft as anything. I think its all in the whipping and air content. :)

      (Can I have some more...)

      1. Mark 85

        Re: Next ...

        If it's non-dairy, I don't see how it can be called "ice cream". Ice cream is made with cream. The next one down the food chain of that food is "ice milk"...

        Yes, you can have all you want. I'll take the real thing please.

        1. Nuno
          Coat

          Re: Next ...

          Mine is without hairs, please!

        2. Jan 0 Silver badge

          Re: Next ...

          @Mark 85

          I think you've forgotten that "cream' is also a generic term.

          After all we've creamed our jeans , used shaving cream or applied Baby Bottom Cream(\tm), haven't we, without involving any dairy ingredients?

          I'm partial to many kinds of ice cream, but the best vanilla ice cream in the UK has to be Swedish Glacé and Booja Booja cashew based ice cream knocks spots off most commercial dairy ice creams. I've also been surprised to eat stunning non dairy ice creams in Sicilian ice cream parlours! I'm prepared to eat any good ice cream whatever its basic ingredients, so long as it tastes good and has the right mouth feel.

          As to the idea of using fungal ingredients rather than alginates to prevent large crystals forming, I say STOP! As a kid I used to love the way that fragile hexagonal slivers of ice would nestle in ice cream. Please bring them back!

          1. Mark 85

            Re: Next ...

            While you are correct, my brain registered this as a food product here in the states, "ice cream" has a specific definition. As I recall, it's "ice cream" with a certain percentage cream, then "ice milk", then "frozen confection" or something like that.....

            Once upon a time, McDonald's called a certain drink a "milk shake". When they took the milk out, it was still called that. Due to the uproar, the FDA got involved. So.. if there's no milk (or below a certain percentage, it has to be called a "shake".

            I too, have had some remarkable things called ice cream in other countries but how they regulate this stuff, I have no idea.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Next ...

      Didnt Maggie Thatcher do this back in the 60's or 70's???

      1. Martin Budden Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Next ...

        That certainly would explain her hairstyle.

  4. Roq D. Kasba

    Not just wood and fungus?

    NZ South Island, I saw this between Mapua and the other side of the big hill on the way to Golden Bay. It was growing out of bare earth, sideways, on the shaded side of the windy roads where it never saw the sun.

    Funnily enough I was thinking about it just this week, wondering what conditions caused the phenomenon, and now some guy has found A set of conditions, but I suspect many parts may be redundant.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Curious,,,

    whats a bioloist?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Curious,,,

      Curious too - but mostly why someone who confuses an ellipsis with a row of commas and can't be bothered with apostrophes takes a poke at a trivial typo under the guise of being puzzled?

  6. J.G.Harston Silver badge
    Coat

    The pun would be "you're a fungi" not "you're a fungi guy".

    Mine's the one with Roger's Mushrooms in the pocket.

    1. Mpeler
      Coat

      For Your Ice Only

      And, softly in the background, I hear (Sheena Easton):

      For Your Ice Only...

    2. Mpeler
      Pint

      Play that Fungi music white boy

      And Vanilla Ice has another cover (as well as Wild Cherry) (Wild Cherry Vanilla Ice?)

      Have a beer float...

  7. Little Mouse
    Boffin

    If any writers of Dr Who or Star Trek are reading this article...

    ...you should use the phrase "stabilised by a recrystallisation inhibitor" in as many episodes as possible.

    1. Mpeler
      Paris Hilton

      Re: If any writers of Dr Who or Star Trek are reading this article...

      Another chance for Khan and Spock to go at it...

      Maybe wearing jackets or parkas of "Rich Corinthian Leather" (for all you Chrysler Cordoba fans out there (both of you) (just kidding!!!!!).

      Paris, well, she can be on the Red Team...

  8. Tom 7

    Needle ice is a similar thing

    below 4C water starts to expand and effectively forces itself out of the ground where the cold air freezes it immediately creating spikes and mounds and all sorts of crazy things. I have a feeling that is all that is going on here - other than the fungus creating wood with a sponge like structure.

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