This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
In a world where plastics and synthetic foams can outlive us in landfills and have detrimental impacts on the environment, there are ways to limit such effects using something that's growing all around us.
Fungal mycelium — the root-like filaments that mushrooms spread into soil to gather nutrients as part of nature’s recycling system — provide a naturally biodegradable solution, suggest engineers Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, the founders of Ecovative Design.
