Marvelous mycelium

A fungal abode A home-grown habitat on Mars might sound like science fiction. But Lynn Rothschild, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, has worked for years to bring that fiction to reality. The key player? Fungus. “We’ve been calling it mycotecture,” Rothschild tells Newscripts, a portmanteau of “mycology,” the study of fungi, and “architecture,” the art of designing buildings. In other words, architecture with fungi . Rothschild envisions astronauts deploying space-hardy inflatable structures with walls filled with dehydrated wood chips and seeded with fungi. “You pack it up, you send it off-planet,” she says, “And then when you get there, you inflate it, add some water, and poof.” As the filamentous tendrils of the fungal body—the mycelium—grow, they will bind the wood into a solid building material. It’s essentially martian housing on demand. There are several advantages to this fungal approach to living off planet. All the