SILVER LINING: Strange Chernobyl dark fungus may ‘eat’ radiation and even help astronauts in space.

But Chernobyl’s fungi weren’t just adapting to the radiation — they were feeding off it. In 2007, Ekaterina Dadachova, a nuclear scientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, built on Zhdanova’s research after revealing that the organism increased while in the presence of radiation. This indicated they were harnessing it — a phenomenon she dubbed “radiosynthesis.”

One could think of it like plants feeding off sunlight — but far more powerful. “The energy of ionizing radiation is around one million times higher than the energy of white light, which is used in photosynthesis,” said the researcher Dadachova. “So you need a pretty powerful energy transducer, and this is what we think melanin is capable of doing — to transduce [ionising radiation] into usable levels of energy.”

Radiosynthesis remains just a theory as scientists have yet to discover the exact mechanism by which the fungi convert radiation into energy.

However, if true, this has major ramifications for a variety of crucial applications, from radiation cleanup at sites like Chernobyl and Fukushima to space exploration — specifically shielding astronauts against harmful cosmic radiation.

Stay tuned.