First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit.

Fried mushrooms, boiled mushrooms, mushroom soup.

Jae Rhim Lee My mushroom burial suit

And so we see a mushroom here sporulating.

I especially like the flavour of the mushroom.

But here is a mushroom that's past its prime.

Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range.

There's a mushroom, ketchup it goes on and on.

(3) Asia Pacific Regional Cooperation on Edible Mushroom Technology

So, this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time.

This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis Agarikon.

But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom.

It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores.

If we go on like this, Harry Junior will be a mushroom.

Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense.

So this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice.

The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost.

It's a mushroom exclusive to the old growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D.

When I saw the mushroom cloud I fell into a state of desperation, he tells me.

In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times.

This mushroom grows in Washington State, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe.

The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots.

You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes.

Eye witnesses said that there was a loud bang when the explosion occurred, and a mushroom cloud rose instantly.

The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt.

Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body.

In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board.

I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation.

4. In the 1950s, nuclear weapons testing took place above ground and the characteristic mushroom cloud became the visible symbol of the nuclear age.

These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the mushroom body, which is shown here in gray.

Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles.

The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies.

It's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the humongous fungus because it happens to be one of the world's largest organisms as well.

Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom.

And then a delicate dance between dinner and death the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head.

This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god.

See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay.

The Life Box you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom.

There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste one was a control pile one pile was treated with enzymes one pile was treated with bacteria and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium.

But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment.

So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects.

And what we've discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you've probably never seen analogous to its root structure it's called mycelium we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics.

I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom.

They do so with good reason. Consider the potential effects of a 50 megaton nuclear explosion, similar to the Tsar Bomba, detonated in October 1961, which shattered windows 900 kilometers (560 miles) away and sent a mushroom cloud rising above the stratosphere.

If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do.