QUOTE : Fungi were among the first organisms to return to the blast zone around the impact point in Hiroshima, the point from which the mushroom cloud had risen. After Hiroshima, too, images of the mushroom cloud began to appear ubiquitously in media and culture – the fruiting bodies of a new global anxiety. Scientists working in Chernobyl after the disaster there were surprised to discover fine threads of melanized fungi lacing the distressed concrete of the reactor itself, where radiation levels were over 500 times higher than in the normal environment. They were even more surprised to work out that the fungi were actively thriving due to the high levels of ionizing radiation: that they benefited from this usually lethal gale, increasing their biomass by processing it in some way.