Humans could live on the planet Mars if a fungi which spawned inside the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is used to protect against radiation, scientists say.
A layer of the fungus around 21 centimetres thick could ‘largely negate the annual dose-equivalent of the radiation environment on the surface of Mars’, researchers found.
‘What makes the fungus great is that you only need a few grams to start out,’ said Nils Averesch, Stanford researcher and study co-author told New Scientist.
‘It self-replicates and self-heals, so even if there’s a solar flare that damages the radiation shield significantly, it will be able to grow back in a few days.’
It has already been able to absorb harmful cosmic rays on the International Space Station, and could potentially be used to protect future Mars colonies.
In 1991, five years after the disaster which rocked Ukraine, the black fungi was found sprouting up the walls of the abandoned reactor which had been flooded with gamma.
