Slashdot Mirror
CD-Eating Fungus Among Us
dublin writes: "The Electronic telegraph reports that two years ago, the first confirmed case of a CD-eating fungus was confirmed in Belize. (Ah, the price of living in paradise...) The fungus eats the aluminum right out from between the polycarbonate layers (and apparently muches a little on those, too) leaving clear spots on the CD. Have fungi always been this mean and we're just figuring it out, or have we been invaded by super-fungi? " The article, to say the least, is a little short on details. But something like this surprises me not in the least.
Hehe... Either that or they'll patent the fungus, then alter it so that it only eats CDRs.
I *dare* you to start an EMail spam warning everyone about this bad new danger to their music collections, and encouraging them to sanitize their CDs before it's too late!
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Here is a partial list of archiving materials:
CDs
Books
Stone Tablets
Clay Tablets
ROM
Battery backed RAM
Hard Disks
Floppies
Feel Free to add to the list and rank them according to durability.
No.
BilldaCat
The trick is to embed your data within a blockbuster film, as the film industry will then preserve it and imprint it on each decade's preferred media.
I doubt that this is a reasonable choice, given the level of activity related to film preservation (e.g., Film Preservation Society) ... celluloid is a very fragile medium, and the requirements for proper archiving are far more stringent that the requirements of media akin to CDs.
The search is not only for a medium that *can* last for an extended period of time, but one that can do so with *simple* and *easily reproduced* archival procedures.
The idea is you have the batceria eat all the gold, then you capture all the batceria and disolve the organic parts and what is left is just the gold.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
...to destroy rewritable CD's only. Hmmm, sounds like a decent made-for-TV movie!
Record Company:
"Don't worry, your $25 triple-locked, biometrically secured Britney Spears disc probably won't be effected at all! And if it does, just buy another one!"
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Surely a direct result of bringing that MIR space-fungus down to earth.. I tried to warn you...
air and light and time and space
>>Could this fungus, once isolated and brought under control, have applications in recycling?
Sure, but the problem is that it probably grows when it eats (like most living things) and I think I've seen that horror flick.
---
A fungus who liked to eat CDs
Made its way to a corp'rate PC
the backups all fried
and admins all cried
mostly bitter 'bout lost MP3s
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
If you put enough food out there, something will evolve to eat it. I just didn't expect it to happen so fast. And the form it takes is a little unusual, I was expecting something to eat the plastic itself. Aluminum can't be nutritious; theoretically you can get energy by oxidizing it, but existing lifeforms do not have the chemical pathways to use this, and the fungus must have other substances to grow. I'm guessing that the fungus eats the glue between the two layers of plastic, and the aluminum is just an innocent bystander. It may also have been primarily growing on something else (like the cardboard label on the case) and just reached down to the glue layer to get some trace element. If it is eating the glue, those gold disks probably won't fare any better, assuming they use the same glue -- the gold foil will still be there, but as the fungus eats the glue on one side and tries to push holes through to the other side I don't think the gold will stay flat and shiny enough to read. But a CD with a different glue would be safe for now, and it is quite likely that only a few spots in the tropic will have the combination of heat, humidity, and the right species of fungus spores to do this -- for now. In a century, we'll probably evolve something that eats the entire CD case and all, and to keep them safe you'll need either a humidity and temperature controlled room, or to bury them in a land-fill where almost nothing ever decomposes. 8-/
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
during this past winter i dropped a few burned cd's into a snowpile/puddle aka slush. and the street salt at through the cd.. xericx
You can kill the fungus (and prevent future growth) between the polycarbonate layers of your cd's by sticking them in the microwave for about 10 seconds. The quick blast does the job, just don't leave in much longer else el meltyo.
Let groups.google.com save it for you.
Where could I pick some of this up? My basement is FULL of AOL CDs!!!
;)
... I'd be fun to watch too
-- iNFRARED
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The fungi used to be part of a very secret cult. However, around 1998-1999, various corporations and government agencies learned of their addiction to polycarbonate layers, and decided they could turn a profit with them.
People would think that the fungi would have become common around 1997 when America Online began distributing large quantities of cds; however, the fungi had no knowledge of this. It wasn't until 98-99 that, due to the high demand of cdrs, that the RIAA, in partnership with various CD manufacturing companies and the US Customs, began importing these little creatures, and spreading them around the country, hoping to reduce the lifespan of cds, and in essence, make more money.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy!
Unfortunately, I don't think it could.
/. thread earlier today] than it takes to mine more bauxite (the ore we get aluminum from). If this fungus 'digests' aluminum, then the aluminum _must_ be reacted with another chemical (I'm guessing oxygen, though I'm not really sure) to produce the energy the fungus needs. That means that you'd have to spend even more energy to extract it than to simply mine more. Since the bauxite ore is aluminum oxide, then the same processes would probably be used.
The point in recycling aluminum isn't to 'destroy' the aluminum, but to reclaim it at a lower cost [thanks to whoever mentioned that earlier on another
What all of that means is that using this fungus to extract the tiny sprinkles of aluminum on a CD aren't cost-efficient enough to make it worthwhile for recycling. It'd actually cost more (and almost certainly yield less) to use this method than to simply mine more aluminum ores.
-SeraphtheSilver
Could this fungus, once isolated and brought under control, have applications in recycling?
"cds last forever"
People never forget:
"people will never need more than 64k memory"
"cell phones dont cause tumors"
"the speed of e-business will make everyone inside the borders of the western world stinking rich"
"napster is the future of music"
I say we mandate that computer cases always be made with a block of wood to knock on, cause these prophecies are almost always wrong.
garret
"Old man yells at systemd"
the geotrichum genus is a filamentous fungi. It is typically characterized by chains of slimy spores, often times with strong odors (they can stink).
It is not odd for this genus to corrode metal; gerotrichum is probably the most common type of fungi found in metal.
Geotrichum candidum was once considered to be a contaminant on the surface of cheeses (it would naturally grow there). Now, however, because it grows so quick it is now used for the inoculation of surface mould to encourage ripening.
While this is scarely news for anyone with a CD collection, it certainly is not surprising. Best of all, however, is that I don't think we have to worry about it too much -- if at all, especially in the US.
-- Robert... something that actually likes AOL CDs.
munch munch
This article was brought to you by Tough-actin' Tenactin.
---
Is there really a safe archive method anymore? CDs now get eaten by fungii, disks and tape are subject to magnetic erasure, paper/hardcopies can burn, nad stone tablets/true hardcopy are breakable...
How Jaded Are You?
Back to lp's for all your data storage needs
Tim
PS. All right, I admit that it might have been Steve Ballmer.
The best part about this is if you eat it you see music....Its waaaay trippy man...
+++
//----(triple c)-------//
Except that the media has taken to calling them "boy bands".