The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost.

Jae Rhim Lee My mushroom burial suit

The overall color fades as the mushroom ages.

There's a mushroom, ketchup it goes on and on.

(3) Asia Pacific Regional Cooperation on Edible Mushroom Technology

But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom.

Bitumen permeates the dirt at the surface or, where thin layers of compost and sediment intervene, somewhat below basement levels.

Elsewhere, prisons in Rwanda are using their 30,000 inmates sewage to provide biogas for cooking and compost for growing vegetables.

It's a mushroom exclusive to the old growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D.

Some fungi are hyperaccumulators, capable of absorbing and concentrating heavy metals in the mushroom fruit bodies.

In 2011, a newly described species of mushroom, Spongiforma squarepantsii , was named after the cartoon's title character.

You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes.

The organic waste is processed in a fermentation plant, producing compost and methane, which is used to produce electricity in a 25 megawatt power plant.

Today it is realized to get around this problem local cities and farms can work together to produce the needed compost for the farmers around them.

The mushroom was used as an intoxicant and entheogen by the peoples of Siberia, and has a religious significance in these cultures.

The primary character of the game is Mario, who must find Princess Toadstool by going through seven Koopa hotels in the Mushroom Kingdom.

In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board.

Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles.

I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation.

They then built a small mushroom farm in a tub, and when this worked, they moved on to a bigger tub, and so on.

The pigment is responsible for its color, and it has antibiotic activity that may function to prevent certain bacteria from growing on the mushroom.

Today the growth of local farmers' markets offer small farms the ability to sell the products that they have grown back to the cities that they got the recycled compost from.

It's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the humongous fungus because it happens to be one of the world's largest organisms as well.

The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies.

Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom.

On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive.

See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay.

The Life Box you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom.

Sewage is produced by all human communities and is often left to compost naturally or is treated using processes that separate solid materials by settlement and then convert soluble contaminants into biological sludge and into gases such as carbon dioxide or methane.

But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment.

So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects.

There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste one was a control pile one pile was treated with enzymes one pile was treated with bacteria and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium.

And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings.

And what we've discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you've probably never seen analogous to its root structure it's called mycelium we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics.

I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom.

That you can go from this zero situation, by planting the vegetables and the trees, or directly, the trees in the lines in that grass there, putting up the buffer zone, producing your compost, and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used.

If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do.

If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have that's gone off you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up.