by Elio — Ac­cus­tomed as we are to mi­cro­bial sur­prises, we were nonethe­less taken aback by a re­port dis­clos­ing that cer­tain fungi grow bet­ter when ex­posed to ion­iz­ing ra­di­a­tion. Ac­cord­ing to a pa­per from Al­bert Ein­stein Med­ical School, fungi can also use ra­di­a­tion as a source of energy─not ex­actly one's view of ra­di­a­tion as some­thing malev­o­lent and bane­ful.