This discovery reveals a mostly unstudied but apparently universal aspect of fungal life.
Mushrooms and possibly all fungi have the ability to cool down by “sweating” away water, a new study reveals.
Lead author Radamés Cordero, who is also a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins, used an infrared camera to snap pictures of mushrooms in the woods. Infrared cameras can visualize the relative temperatures of each object in a photo, and Cordero noticed something odd: The mushrooms seemed to be colder than their surroundings.
The team then created a sort of mushroom-powered air conditioner. They put mushrooms — Agaricus bisporus, commonly sold in supermarkets as portobello and white mushrooms, among other names — into a styrofoam box with a hole on each side. A fan was placed outside one of the holes, and they put this “MycoCooler” into a larger container and turned the fan on to circulate air over the mushrooms.