David, a 33-year-old associate professor at Yale University, took two male graduate students to investigate the Amazon River basin in February 2011 and also completed his own research paper. That night, three people set up their tents next to each other. To prevent mosquito bites, two graduate students also sprayed perfume on their underwear. After a tiring day, they soon fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, David suddenly heard the exclamation of two graduate students. He quickly picked up the gun and ran out, only to see a dark figure disappearing from the side of the tent, and there was a strange laugh in the air. David quickly got into the graduate student’s tent and found that their sleeping bags were gone, and their underwear was gone.
What they didn’t expect was that strange things happened again the next night. The undershirt on one of the graduate students seemed to have been burned by fire, but his body didn’t hurt or itchy. There was still a faint steam of water in the tent. David reached out to grab it, but he caught nothing.
Strange things happened one after another, so that their investigation could no longer continue. On the third day, David had to return to school with two graduate students. After the teachers and classmates in the school heard about it, no one believed them, even David’s wife Nancy expressed doubts.
In order to find out the truth, David took his wife to the rainforest again. The two followed the last route and quickly arrived at their destination. Because Nancy suffers from chronic bronchitis, she feels that the air pressure in the deep rainforest is too low, and she is a little out of breath. That night, they pitched their tent on the top of a hill. Nothing happened at night. After daybreak, they came to a small village where Indians lived and asked an old hunter for advice. The old hunter told them such a legend…
Long ago, there were many Indians in the area, and there were frequent wars between tribes. , The victor will kill all the men on the defeated side and throw them into a rainforest named Ukala to feed the beasts. Over time, these ghosts gathered together and began to play a game of picking people’s clothes.
David and his wife were confused. Why didn’t their clothes be stripped off last night? The old hunter said, it depends on whether the stripper is interested in the stripped person. In order to confirm what the old hunter said, David took his wife to the place where they set up the tent last time. As a result, when it was about to dawn, the clothes of the two of them were not only stripped, but they also disappeared from their sleeping bags.
David and his wife thought about it all day and didn’t come up with a clue, but they didn’t believe that their clothes were stripped by a ghost. The encounter between David and his wife attracted the attention of the chemist Professor Omid, and he asked David to take him to the rainforest again. Before departure, Professor Omid asked David to bring the underwear he and his wife wore with him.
The two spent three nights in the rain forest, but nothing happened. On the fourth night, Professor Omid asked David to take out his wife’s underwear. A surprising scene finally appeared. In the dim light, just a few minutes later, a faint mist gradually enveloped David’s wife. underwear.
Next, the underwear disappeared inexplicably under the eyes of the two people, disappearing fast, as if being burned by fire, but no flames were visible. Back at Yale University, Professor Omid immersed himself in experiments for several days.
A week later, he told David that it was a fungus that made his wife’s underwear disappear, and he had named the fungus Pseudochrysosporium microsporum. This fungus is very small and invisible to the naked eye. They are afraid of heat, like humidity and temperature, so they only appear at night, and low-lying environments are most suitable for them.
They usually dormant in the rainforest. What is surprising is that they like to feed on polyurethane. The underwear worn by David’s wife and the two graduate students contains chemical fibers, which are actually a kind of polyurethane. So it was the fungus that ate their clothes.
When David entered the rainforest for the first time, because he was wearing clothes to sleep, his clothes were not eaten by the fungus, but this time he was not spared. In addition, this kind of fungus also likes the smell of perfume. Under the stimulation of perfume, they will multiply and grow exponentially, and they can reproduce one generation in a few seconds. The faint mist is actually fungus, because they are too small and too small. , So it looks like fog.
When their number reaches a certain value, one piece of underwear can be “eaten” within ten minutes. As for the strange call that David heard, it was actually the call of an owl in the forest, and the dark shadow he saw was probably some kind of curious animal, which was completely coincidental.
Later, Omid and David jointly signed and published the paper “Study on the degradation of Polyurethane spores and Polyurethane”. They mentioned in the paper that this fungus is not harmful to the human body, and they can not only “eat” the chemical fiber-containing Clothes can also complete plastic degradation in an anaerobic environment. With this new discovery, there is a way to degrade the waste plastic in the garbage, and the application prospect is very broad
