so the funky were able to occupy the plants themselves and form the beautiful tree like structures which we call up a skill, and is through these oper skills that the plans are able to take phosphorus from the fungus and return the plant, gives the fungus comp and that it's generated through photo synthesis, the 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 wrap the c o 2 writes up around 3 times it's level in the current atmosphere. so some quick look and see i'll deliver what to doing in that. so this is one of my favorite live. what this is troy, you're lucky? no sir. actually the most ancient lamp lie on us today. and it's probably really similar to how the very 1st alarm plans were by 400000000 years ago. i know you can

see, is there a really well under those high c o. 2 concentrations in the cabinet, which suggests that the fungus is doing its job and supplying it with nutrients from the soil on the plan to really well. because of that, by working with fungi, lever 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, paving the way for complex plants. and so you end up with these much larger plans evolving which have leaves the masa which are able to control the sphere to movement into the leaves. which are able to allow the plant really big ups up 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 that is allowing another organism to grow in between itself and in to itself. and that not only is it allowing them to do that, but it's actually their iving and benefit from it. mm . funny how involved it would be a very, very radically different looking kind of planet. we certainly within the here ah, the, 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. lisa lineage funky that, able to do something quite different in the soil than what the early funds were involved in. allow implants 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 sort of wood wide web. one sort is formed by the decompose, a funky, the rotter's, the breakdown dead plant material, a vein to connect between lots of different dad resources. without these

d, composers wife in the forest would soon be buried under dead material. fungi eat this material and in doing so, they create new life, the garbage disposal agents of the natural world. they break down dead organic matter. and by doing that, they release nutrients and those nutrients have been made available for plants to carry on growing and otherwise 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 their 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 some duct 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, this 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 emerged. 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 1st became his phone gold composed. think about it. overnight. you have to go back to. dust is kicked up. 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, insignificant animal groups survived the mammals, from which humans would eventually evolve. it's thought that they were immune to the fungi, lethal onslaught, mammals as one built in advantage relative to the reptiles, their hot reptiles, so quite separate from the diseases. but your typical mammal which maintains a temperature is mid thirties, herself. 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 today's encounter, 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 strains grew. but on our 37 degree plate, we can see 2 of those, and we haven't grown at all. and that's because they don't survive at $37.00, it happens to be visit the same ones that cannot infect 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, bass hibernate in the winter. when the temperature drops, they become susceptible to this fungal disease. here is the interesting thing. if you take the bats when they're infected and you feed them, wake him up. i lead to

a temperature go up. you're able to control the some of the th thought. 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 c b iceman. 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 mystery in the beginning. they've 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 meant that doctor

or isn'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, it's enhancing your immune system and it will help you also against cancer against inflammation via the book 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 palace, mine was spiritual, like bringing the spirit of god 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. ah, for most of history, humanity was decimated by bacterial epidemics. but since the 1st penicillin tell,

world population has tripled and allowed us to build vast cities, changing the face of the planet. we're expected 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. the life saving power of antibiotics is the outcome of an ancient war. fungi and bacteria are sworn enemies. whereas on the growing, they came to bacteria and over millions and millions of years. they've evolved 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. the challenge is 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 microorganisms around various environments. and from the 10000 extracts we found one that had excellent activity and overcoming

resistance. we call it a m a for short, because guilim are asked the natives too much to say everything incredibly, is compound produced by a common soil. fungus asper journalists, can restore the power of our antibiotics. when i saw the results, i actually didn't believe 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. in 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 suppressant and collateral lowering status. many of the new drugs we're thinking about are coming from pharmacy and so in your everyday life there this magic set of, 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 fringy. and so what we started to do is to look to social insects, who like us, have many challenges with microbial pathogens that would like nothing other than to destroy their entire society. calling only one promising candidate is nature's worst housekeeper the window and seemingly oblivious to hygiene. the ant 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 it 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? what, how do you prevent the pathogens associated with those things from killing you? what we're doing here is collecting the amps, 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 and might be using the breakdown with the waste in their colony in the lab. and madden recovers the fungi found on the 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. crazy diversity for one. that's awesome. we're seeing different fungi here, but it's likely they're more species here. then we can even see,

my biggest hope is that this is a 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 sequencing 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. so if we look to many of our problems, and we think about what the challenge is, bungee offer a vast reservoir of possibilities those 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. the,

an epidemic on kennedy's west coast is a warning of fungi, the lethal power. in 2001 veteran arians on vancouver island, noticed something unusual. many cats and dogs had developed lumps under their skin and we're having trouble breathing. good afternoon. soon people began complaining of stubborn coughs, headaches, and nights which x rays revealed shadows on their lungs. they thought they had cancer, they were told that by the surgeons, and so they cut it out alone. behold, it was not a cancer, it was a fungal infection. the culprit turned out to be crypt caucus getting a relatively harmless fungus previously only seen in tropical environments. like australia, the question was, how do they 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 microbe hunter. when c gaddy, i appeared, it was her job to located in the wild. there was no time to lose c gatti, 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 eucalyptus trees. it gave us at least something to go on the trees and out was our show, the starting point. but i was also taking air samples from that was actually the big breakthrough for you really needed to get this pores airborne. and there is no way to control it. 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 cross 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 cryptogenic disease or not. what made c gatti 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 cryptic caucus disease on channel 6 news victoria. 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, nice twit, next business. and dr. esquire got a sample, took it and cultured it and came back and said that i did in fact have crypt, 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, 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 with surround your brain, and some people would actually conveyed the brain tissue. so we could see is 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 me, but let me but now they are animals. they do move around and they eat other organisms for their food source in this evolutionary arms race. she gaddy, i build

a protective shield to avoid being even now shift 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 like a whole bunch different. and so let me do just like me. but in the soil, our white glove jones, the microphone ages in gulf invading microbes were c 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, this 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 got the 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 up 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 see, got it is on the move. it was localized. so australia, then, in a blink of an eye, this becomes a war why problem is spreading through united states. 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 franchise that can grow at 37 degrees. a 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 arrived 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. 8 the rocks, they created the soils and nurtured the plants that turn the planet green. to have the planet that we have today, we had to have funky, it was fungi that brought back life after each global catastrophe. if there were no fungi, there would be no other way. there are down in our world. it was fungi that paved the way for civilization. they have made us who we are all around the, are they spongy that are falling on you that are going to all through our fate as

human. and we're just starting to figure it out. as we continue to explore the fungal empire are most exciting discoveries are yet to come. the me. it's a brave new world post corona virus. equality home office and lonely poverty economy repeated life and frenzy online shopping conservation vaccinations, sterilizations face, math sound. when i feel everything, what kind of way just waiting for us after corona, and are we ready for me in 30 minutes on d. w. oh. the

news. please. listen carefully. don't know how to go. i feel magic the discover the world around you subscribe to the documentary on youtube. sometimes a seed, it's all you need to allow the big ideas to grow. we're bringing environmental conservation to life with learning past,

like global ideas. we will show you how climate change and environmental conservation is taking shape around the world and how we can all make a difference knowledge and grows through sharing. download it now for a a a this is d, w, and these are our top stories. us president joe biden has arrived in geneva, switzerland. i had of a summit with his russian cow part of that. a mere push on wednesday bite in is expected to confront fujen over several issues, including recent ransomware attacks and the detention of russian dissident. i'll explain a bonnie the pair are also like to discuss cooperation on nuclear arms control. mm. israel has launched air strikes.