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  • you could say there are two types of mold Good and the bad Penicillium.

  • No.

  • Tatum, for example, gave rise to the drug penicillin, which by some estimates has saved at least 200 million human lives, while other molds, like aspergillus Flavius, produce toxins that can harm and even kill you.

  • But whether or not you wanted around mold is everywhere.

  • In fact, you're likely breathing it in right now, and there's pretty much nothing you could do to get rid of it.

  • Mold is a fungus like mushrooms, and it's made up of thousands of threadlike filaments called Hi Fi.

  • It uses those filaments like roots to feed hi fi, extend into your stale bread or rotten tomato and start releasing digestive enzymes, which are actually similar to the enzymes in our stomachs.

  • Molson digest their food just like we do, except if you were a mold, it would be more like just laying your face in your food and soaking up the food through your skin.

  • That's Cathy Hodge, Mike ologists and mold maven at Cornell University.

  • She says that by the time you actually see that fuzzy mold, hi fi are already hard at work deep below the surface, so cutting out the moldy part does little to harm the entire organism.

  • Just like ripping off leaves doesn't kill a plant.

  • What's worse is that molds have an incredibly broad diet.

  • Yes, they love bread, but some species also love dead skin, soap and even the paper covering drywall.

  • That's according to Nicholas Money, who has authored several books on fungus.

  • There's a good food source for these molds lying beneath the paint, so when that structure gets wet band, they'll go for it.

  • But if there's one thing that makes mold so difficult to manage, its this spores spores air like seeds, which molds used to reproduce.

  • They'll produce these aerial structures like little little stocks, all microscopic, and then they'll form spores at the tips of those stocks on.

  • Then, in response to airflow, those supposedly carried that they'll get up into the atmosphere.

  • A single mold can make hundreds of thousands of spores, so it's no surprise that mold counts in cities like Chicago could be a Zayas, 125,000 spores per cubic meter.

  • You've got millions of tons of these sports in the atmosphere.

  • It doesn't look like it right.

  • But yeah, if you could.

  • Really?

  • If you could visualize that it would be, um, mind blowing.

  • Absolutely.

  • And they're not just outside there in your home.

  • They're everywhere to show you what I mean.

  • I set up a little experiment in my apartment.

  • All of high school biology thes are Petri dishes, and they're filled with what's called auger, which is essentially a growth medium for mold.

  • So I am very excited.

  • Thio.

  • Place them around my apartment and see what kinds of mold will grow in them.

  • I put one by my bed, another by the window and one in my bathroom, and I left them open for about an hour to collect sports.

  • A week later, they looked like this.

  • Yeah, I'm not sure if it's beautiful or absolutely disgusting.

  • The dish by the window had the most diverse assemblage about 10 species, most of which are just common indoor molds, according to Professor Hodge.

  • And the one by my bed, you know where I sleep wasn't exactly empty.

  • Now this seems terrifying, but is it so?

  • At least one of the molds I collected is likely class story, Um, and according to money, a vast proportion of the human species is actually reactive to cloud a spore iam.

  • In other words, if we get enough of the spores of Claudius Forum in our lungs, that they'll create some kind of an allergic reaction and high mold counts can also trigger asthma, he says.

  • But it actually gets worse.

  • You see, some molds produce nasty chemicals called mycotoxins.

  • Such a stack e Beatrice or black mold stachybotrys make airborne toxins and they seem toe also affect our health.

  • Even our cognitive abilities are sometimes affected by high doses of mold toxins, and it's actually these mycotoxins that make moldy food potentially dangerous.

  • Some cheese molds are actually toxin producers.

  • For example, a particular one makes a toxin called pentagrams that is a neurotoxin, so just eating lots of moldy things without knowing what mold is growing on them is probably not a great idea.

  • But here's the thing for mold toe actually cause you harm.

  • There needs to be a lot of it, even if it's toxin producing.

  • So most homes like mine are safe, and there are a lot of molds that we don't wanna live without.

  • I'm not just talking about penicillin, but molds like Tali Poke, lady um, inflate, Um, which is used to make an immune suppressive drug called cyclosporin.

  • And there's this one.

  • This is aspergillus ***.

  • It's some people's favorite mold because this mold can you see it.

  • It's perfect.

  • It's adorable, isn't it?

  • This mold makes almost all the citric acid that's produced in the world, and citric acid is a really common food preservative and flavor additive.

  • So the next time you're drinking soda or fighting off an infection, think of molds.

  • They may be impossible to get rid of and frankly, just straight up gross.

  • But we definitely don't want all of them to die.

  • I'm just assuming that things were gonna be grocer in the bathroom, Um, near the near the toilet.

  • So cool.

you could say there are two types of mold Good and the bad Penicillium.

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