so the phone you were able to occupy the plant themselves and form the beautiful tree like structures which we call our bus q. and it's through these oper skills that the plans are able to take phosphorus from the fungus. and in return, the plant gives the fungus comp and that it's generated through photo synthesis. katie field can recreate the atmosphere that was around when fun joy and liver words began cooperating. so what we've done is we've ramped the c o 2, right tops around 3 times its level in the current atmosphere. so some quite look and see how the liver, what's a doing in that? so this is one of my favorite live. what does it show you like, you know, so actually the ancient lamb on us today. and it's probably really similar to how the very 1st alarm plans were by 400000000 years ago. and as you can see,

it's really well under those high c o, 2 concentrations in this cabinet, which suggests that the fungus is doing its job and it supplying it with nutrients from the soil on the plant. really well because of that, by working with fungi, liver words not only survive, they thrive, sucking up carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. these tiny plants gave the planet it's 1st breath of fresh air. and over time, they changed the composition of the entire atmosphere painting away for complex plants. and so you end up with these much larger plants evolving which have leaves, tomas, which are able to control the sphere to movement into the leaves. which are able to allow the plants grow really big above ground. ever since nearly every plan has been nurtured by their symbiotic fungi. i am still captivated by

this whole idea of a plant that is alive that is healthy, and it's allowing another organism to grow in between itself and in to itself. and not only is it allowing them to do that, but it's actually their iving a benefit from it. mm. it's funny how involved it would be a very, very radically different looking kind of planet we certainly will be here. ah, in the golden age of the dinosaurs, the planet was exploding with life tree ferns and conifers dotted the landscape. but it was the fungi beneath the ground that was making all this possible kind of classic out of sight out of mind type of organisms. but if you take a step back, the funny are really the organisms that are putting those plans there. as trees

developed, new types of fungi evolved. they formed partnerships with the roots of trees and gave rise to entire forests, miscellaneous funky, that able to do something quite different in the soil than what the early funds that were involved in, allowing plans to call a nice land could do above ground. these new fungi are characterized by their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, flipped beneath the surface. they form complex networks. scientists call it the wood wide web. in fact, there are 2 sorts of wood wide web. one sort is formed by the decompose a fungus. the water is the breakdown plant material to connect between lots of

different dad's resources. without these decompose, there's wife in the forest would soon be buried under dead material. fungi eat this material and in doing so, they create new life garbage disposal agents are not for world. they break down dead organic matter. and by doing that, they release nutrients and those nutrients have been made available for plans to carry on growing and other one is all the nutrients on the planet will be locked up in dead stuff. the 2nd type of wood wide wind is formed between living plants, especially trees hungry for food, the fungal filaments called hifi search for tree root. they enveloped the root and some find the way inside. here they provide water and minerals in exchange for sugars. but this is more than

a trade the entire forest is now connected through the fungi. the if you sum up the distance traveled by the hi fi, just beneath a single foot, it would be more than 500 kilometers of hi fi, a vast network, that traffics and everything that for us need. the use is nature's internet and information highway that allows trees to communicate and even send out danger signals to each other. rather than a collection of individual trees, a forest operates more like a super organism. ah, connected by the fungal network. a lush and vibrant planet be merged,

but hundreds of millions of years of evolution would be blown away in a single moment. an asteroid strike wiped out 70 percent of all species. yet fungi, nature's ultimate survivor would turn the cataclysm to its advantage. the 3rd became, if bungle composed. think about it overnight, you have just the dice for. dust is kicked up and there is no sunlight. and you have all these decaying plant matter. the fungi then can reproduce very rapidly in this expanse of death, fungi inherited the earth and incredibly,

without this catastrophe, we wouldn't be here. and otherwise, in significant animal groups survived the mammals, from which humans would eventually evolve. its thought that they were immune to the fungi, lethal onslaught. mammals was built in advantage relative to the reptiles, their hot, the reptiles, so quite separate from the diseases. but your typical mammal which maintains the temperatures in mid thirty's or so create a thermal exclusionary zone for fungi. it's an intriguing theory. and if correct, the temperatures of warm blooded animals would be above the temperature, tolerated by most fungi, our total cost devoss team set out to test the hypothesis. so after 2 days in culture, either $25.00 degrees, which is ambient room temperature,

or $37.00 degree human body temperature. we can see that there are differences in growth. so on the 25 degree plate, we can see all 4 of these strange grew. but on our 37 degree plate, we can see 2 of those, and you haven't grown at all. and that's because they don't survive at $37.00, it happens to be the same ones that cannot insect people. the narrow margin protecting us from fungal pathogens is the difference between life and death. in america, millions of little bats are dying from a newly arrived. fungus. bass are like us. warm blooded, however bad hibernate in the winter. and when the temperature drops, they become susceptible to this fungal disease. here is the interesting thing. if you take the bass when they are infected and you feed them, wake them up and let the temperatures go up. you're able to control this. all of

these funds. when they're cold, their immune system cannot do it by itself. oh. busy protected by their high temperature, mammals were free to roam, to fungi dominated world ah, this is see the iceman a victim of a neolithic murder. his body was perfectly preserved in the ice for thousands of years. and among his belongings were some intriguing items. there were 2 objects which were big nice during the beginning they turned out to be fungi, pony, boars. we were thinking, could it be food, but you would not put them a lot of work in food to make it so nice. your doctor

wasn't. peitner is one of the scientists who studied these mushrooms. the evidence suggests they were much more than decoration. now we know that it's in hansing your immune system and it will help you also against cancer against inflammation by p buck area. so it has a huge array of medicine properties. these poly pores are the 1st recorded use of mushrooms as medicine. but for the iceman it meant even more. it was a talisman, was spiritual, like bringing this be discussed with you to protect you on your journey. ah, in western culture,

the power of mushrooms would soon be forgotten and it's only an accident that revived it. in 1928, fungal spores blew through the window of a london hospital. they landed in a petri dish in the laboratory of alexander fleming. this fungus called penis sylium, would change the course of human history. you looked at one of these unusual petri dishes and at that interface between the bacteria and the fun gee, was a zone where nothing was growing. what he would come to realize was that was the, where the funds were producing enzymes, chemicals that were outside of the body of the fungus and killing the bacteria. and that's the germ of the discovery of antibiotics. for most of history, humanity was decimated by bacterial epidemics. but since the 1st penicillin pill

world population has tripled and allowed us to build vast cities, changing the face of the planet, respected to add another 2000000000 people to the planet will need more food. with that number of people will need more antibiotics. and so we're going to need to depend on funding more than we do today. a life saving power of antibiotics is the outcome of an ancient war. fungi and bacteria are sworn enemies. whereas us on the growing, they came to bacteria and over millions and millions of years, they devolved mechanisms to kill those bacteria. but bacteria are constantly evolving. and as a result, we are now facing a global crisis of antibiotic resistance. unless we find a solution,

hundreds of millions will die challenges, we don't have any new drugs. and what we need to do is find new ways to overcome this problem. micro biologist, jerry, right. wondered if fungi had evolved ways of overcoming bacterial resistance. and that meant returning to the soil, looking for a compound that might help to safeguard our antibiotics. guys, that's more dirt for you. it came from the back of the university. you can get anything cool out of it. we screened 10000 extracts that we had collected from micro organisms around various environments. and from the 10000 extracts we found one that had excellent activity of overcoming

resistance. we call it a m a for sure, because i gilmer, asked me neighbors too much to say everything. incredibly, this compound, produced by a common soil fungus as per jealous can restore the power of our antibiotics. when i saw the result, i actually didn't believe it. it just seems, it just seemed relatively too easy to do, but it turned out to be real. so every week, every month, as we continued to work on this compound and kept saying, well, can be used for pneumonia or can be used for this kind of infection. every time we did this, it's an experiment like this. it was proving to be really effective. ah, when these fungal molecules were added to antibiotics, even the most resistance super bugs were defeated. i've been working in this field for 25 years and never had any molecule that's shown to be that potent. and that's

insanely exciting. the kingdom of fungi is nature's chemical factory, offering immense benefits to humanity. already half of our 20 most valuable medicines are derived from fungi, including immuno suppressants and collateral. lowering stephens, many of the new drugs we're thinking about are coming from from g and so in your everyday life there this magic set of compounds that we rely on. scientists are now investigating the benefits of a wide range of mushrooms for their anti inflammatory anti cancer, anti oxidant, and immune stimulant properties. a challenging thing for as a scientist is trying to understand why they're doing it. and how do we tap into that and actually enhance our chances of finding what we,

what we want with millions of potential candidates, the search for beneficial fungi needs, clever detective work. you know, the great thing is there a bunch of insects that we know probably have useful fun, g. but then there are lots of other insects that nobody's ever studied in the context of bungee. and so what we started to do is to look the social insects who like us, have many challenges with microbial pathogens that would like nothing other than to destroy their entire society. only one promising candidate is nature's worst housekeeper, the window and seemingly oblivious to hygiene. the ants live surrounded by waste and decaying bodies. right next to the larvae and eggs. we found a whole bunch of ant poop and an skeleton that ants. and so i was certainly that means the answer doing something interesting. think about in the context of your

own life. if you had in your bedroom a bunch of poop and dead bodies, you'd immediately worry about, well, how did they get there? but also about pathogens, right? like, how do you prevent the pathogens associated with those things from killing you? what we're doing here is collecting the ants, but also collecting some of the garbage. and what we want to do is figure out if in that garbage, there's a fungus which could be useful as an antibiotic. but also that the ants might be using the breakdown with the waste in their colony. in the lab and madden recovers the fungi found on the ants, shedding light on a previously unseen world. so this is my favorite part because you never really know what's going to grow from these insects on a petri plant. it's crazy diversity for one. that's awesome. we're seeing different

fungi here, but it's likely that there are more speed here than we can even see. my biggest hope is that this has got antibiotic producing fungi, and this is got funds that we can use to clean up human ways. yeah, i guess we don't, we don't know what these are yet. right. right. so we have to do for the genetic sequence thing to find out who they are so that afterwards we can find out what they do. it makes me answer not to now. is that too much? yeah, sorry. we've barely begun our journey into the mysterious kingdom of fungi. there are wonders to be discovered wherever we search for. if we look for many of our problems, and we think about what the challenge is, bungee offer a vast reservoir of possibilities both because of their mastery of chemistry and because of their diversity. fungi are nature's grades, survivors. this makes them both powerful allies and given the chance for middle enemies. an epidemic on kennedy's

west coast is a warning of fundraising, lethal power in 2001 veterinary and on vancouver island, noticed something unusual. many cats and dogs had to lumps under their skin and we're having trouble breathing in doctor's office. soon people began complaining of stubborn coughs, headaches, and nights which x rays revealed shadows on their lungs. they thought they had cast her. they were told that by the surgeons and so they cut it out alone. behold, it was not cancer, it was a fungal infection. the culprit turned out to be crypt to congress, getty, i a relatively harmless fungus, previously only seen in tropical environments like australia. the question was, how did it get here? we did not know, and this is where we've bit of

a detective story to sort that out. what we are really looking at when we're looking at fungi is evolution itself. karen bartlet is a micro hunter. when c gaddy, i appeared, it was her job to located in the wild. there was no time to lose. see, getting i had already infected hundreds of people, killing more than one in 10. once we knew that it was gatti, i then we contacted our australian colleagues where is endemic and primarily associate with your lip stories. it gave us at least something to go on. the trees and out was our initial starting point. but i was also taking air samples and that was actually the big breakthrough for you really needed to get this pores airborne . and there is no way of controlling

with an infection rate 10 times higher than in australia. vancouver island was declared a hot zone. standing in the middle of these trees in the middle of literally a forest and not knowing whether it was going to be an epidemic curve. it was pretty sobering. the 2nd thing that crossed my mind at that point was that because i was the one they're taking the samples is if i had a risk of coming down with disease or not. what made c gaddy i scary, was that it could also badly affect healthy people. it's very, very unusual. left undetected the infection can be lethal. can james, a former mill worker from duncan was lucky? his life was saved by coincidence. center for disease control and issuing

a health warning. here are the symptoms to watch. oh for. they were doing a report on this crypted caucus disease on channel 6 news out of toria. they started going through the symptoms and i was like check check, check. and basically i had pretty much all of the symptoms that, that had described, undiagnosed fever nights, twit, next business. and dr. esquire got a sample, i took it and cultured it and came back and said that i didn't fac, have crept the caucus. invasive fungal infections are difficult to treat, and early diagnosis is essential. it's very hard to treat us to give you an example. if you have bacterial pneumonia, you can often be treated for 2 weeks, and you get better. when you have a fungal disease, you often have to treat for many months. i was on the medication for

a year. had i not seen tv show? no, i might not be here talking to you today, right. and i mean, the people have died from it. not everyone is as lucky as can. the infection can become lethal when the fungus finds its way from the lung to the brain. you've got this fungal infection that was surround your brain and some people would actually invade the brain tissue. so we could see small lesions that would look like cause swiss cheese in their brain. but how can a harmless yeast, the thrives and soil find a way to invade and kill healthy humans? because the ecology of the soil, there are other organisms there including omega. so let me but now they are animals . they do move around and they each other organisms for their food source in this evolutionary arms race. c. gaddy, i built

a protective shield to avoid being eaten. now shifts that whole concept to the human body. as humans, we have a primary defense system that it's called white blood cells. and if you were nicely looking at them under the microscope, they don't look a whole bunch different to say let me do just like me. but in the soil, our white glove jones, the microphone ages in gulf invading microbes, se gatti, i is equipped to deal with this challenge, the same traits that allow them to survive them, eva, allow them to survive. macro flashes in the long, long before the 1st human dis fungus had evolved the means to kill us. should we cross paths? probably would have lived out its happy little life without our even knowing it was here. gripped to caucus gaddy,

i lay peacefully in the environment until conditions changed and the change was global warming. we know that over the last 40 years, the average mean temperature has gone out by a degree or 2 in this particular area. we have longer, dry spills and so as soon as you get that just stirred up the possibility of people inhaling, the prosecutor goes up. and so the possibility of people coming down with critical disease because me see, god is on the move. it was localized so strangely, then in a blink of an eye, this becomes a worldwide problem is spreading. tonight is days. and we think that this has stablish itself in this continent. and we're going to be seen a lot more of the vancouver outbreak is a cautionary tale in

a warming world. given the opportunity fungi are always ready to invade new territory, including us. it has only been by very good fortune, that humans in general have only a few pathogenic fungi, because there are only a few pathogenic fungi that can grow at 37 degrees. human body temperature, that's been our savior. but as the planet warms, more and more fungi are forced to adapt to new conditions. therefore, organisms arrive there, but i'm not capable of causing disease today because their temperatures keep them out. who become new pathogens. ah, fungi will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways to ignore them is both a lost opportunity and a dangerous mistake. and so i think it's more important than ever to understand

what this relationship we have is with bungee because we don't have control over them. and we're hoping that we can keep this mostly peaceful relationship going. since the dawn of life fungi have been the driver of evolution on land. they ate the rocks, they created the soils and nurtured the plants that turn the planet green. to house the plan that we have today, we had to have fun going. it was fungi that brought back life after each global catastrophe. if there were no fungi, there would be no other life. there are teeth down in our world. it was fungi that paved the way for civilization. they have made us who we are all around the are these funds that are falling on you that are going to alter our

fate as human. and we're just starting to figure it out. as we continue to explore the fungal empire, our most exciting discoveries are yet to come. the me the us vaccination campaign is making good progress. note everywhere is reflected by and the mountains, plenty of doses remain and here they only herbal medicine. and god can dr. hensley from the local hospital, persuasive axis, golden 3000. 30 minutes on d. w. africa, south africa,

both to new energy, the initiative green cave, the 4th young environmental finally startup. generate clean energy from forward and hydro power. there's always energy on africa. minutes on the w o and above all, feels jewish life that went through producer and owner and journalist eve cooperman are exploring, delving into history and the presence that i would never have thought they could be

live. so i and i live in europe. the 2 part documentary starts july 5th on d w. ah, the, this is deed of the news and these are our top stories. us president joe biden has arrived in geneva, switzerland ahead of a summit with his russian counterpart of let him you're putting on wednesday. bite in is expected to confront fujen over several issues, including recent ransomware attack and the detention of russian dissidence.