Hey,
Most brands write a formula once and sell it forever. Change is risk; if people already like the thing, why touch it?
This edition is about touching it anyway. We took an extract that was already working — that people had bought, felt, and told us about — back into the lab, and came out the other side with a bottle half the size. Same servings. Same month's supply. Same price. Less liquid.
Then three from the wider kingdom: fungi that digest plastic, shiitake wired up as computer memory, and the mouldy melon that every penicillin factory on earth descends from.
01 · From Our Lab
What's growing, what we're building, and what we changed — dispatches from the Fungamental lab in Bangalore.
60ml, meet 30ml.
Our bottles are shrinking. The Lion's Mane and Cordyceps extracts you know as 60ml bottles are becoming 30ml bottles, and we want to explain why before you assume we're quietly giving you less.
You're not getting less. You're getting the same thirty servings, the same month per bottle, the same one-millilitre daily dose — and the same price. What's changed is the concentration. We doubled it, which means the dose that used to take two millilitres now takes one, and a bottle that used to hold sixty needs to hold thirty. Same extract, same number of days, half the liquid around it.
Here's the part worth being precise about, because "more concentrated" is a phrase brands reach for without earning it. Two changes, and neither is a gimmick. The extraction now runs longer and over repeated passes. And there's a new reduction step at the end — we gently take water out of the finished extract, so the same material ends up carried in half the volume. That water removal is what lets one millilitre do what two used to. We're not going to dress it up beyond that: it's a longer extraction and a careful reduction, not a reinvention.
Which raises a fair question: smaller bottle, same price — aren't you paying more for less? Only if the thing you were buying was the liquid. You weren't. You were paying for thirty days of a specific dose, and that's exactly what you still get. The water was never the product.
We could have left it alone. The old extract worked — the feedback was good, the repeat orders were there, nobody was asking us to change anything. That's usually the exact moment a formula gets frozen forever. We took it back into the lab because "it sells" and "it's as good as we can make it" are two different sentences, and we'd rather answer to the second one.
The smaller bottle is just the visible evidence of that. A month's supply in a smaller pack, using less glass, delivering the same thing you already trust in a more concentrated form. Same product. Just a version we refused to call done.
The rollout is staged — Lion's Mane and Cordyceps first, Reishi and Shiitake to follow — so for a short window you may see both sizes out there. If you've got a 60ml bottle, nothing about it has changed; keep taking it exactly as you were. When you reorder, you'll get the 30ml, and the only thing to adjust is the dose: one millilitre a day, not two.
02 · From the World of Mycology
Three things worth knowing, from research we've been reading.
SUSTAINABILITY
Fungi on a coconut husk that digest plastic
This one starts with a high school student and ends somewhere genuinely useful.
Vera Wang, a student at Kaiser High School in Hawaiʻi, built an ocean filter to pull sunscreen and microplastics out of surface water. It was made entirely from coconut byproducts, and the design borrowed from traditional Polynesian weaving. Then she ran into the obvious problem: capturing a pollutant isn't the same as getting rid of it. You've just moved it.
So she went looking at the filter itself. Coconut fibre is porous, which moves air and water, which makes it good habitat for microbes. Working in Anthony Amend's lab at UH Mānoa with graduate student Kaylee Christensen, she found that fungi living naturally on coconut husks can biodegrade both plastic and sunscreen — and that a tannin compound can identify which fungi have the ability. The tannins in the fibre may be what encourages those degraders to grow there in the first place. Some of the species they sequenced matched nothing in the world's largest genetic reference database.
Being straight about the stage: this is science-fair research, recognised and impressive, not a peer-reviewed cleanup technology. But the shape of it is what interests us — a waste material, hosting organisms nobody had catalogued, that eat a waste problem. Most of the fungal kingdom is still uncatalogued. This is what that means in practice.
Read more → https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/05/11/coconut-fungi-decompose-plastic/
TECHNOLOGY
Somebody built computer memory out of shiitake
photo by - John LaRocco.
We grow shiitake to extract it. A team in Ohio has been growing it to store data.
A memristor is a circuit component that remembers its own electrical state. Combine memory and processing in one device and you have the basis for neuromorphic computing — machines built to work more like brains than like spreadsheets. Conventional memristors need rare-earth minerals and energy-intensive fabrication. John LaRocco's team at Ohio State instead grew shiitake and button mushrooms, dehydrated them for stability, wired electrodes to different zones of the fungal mat — different parts of a mushroom behave differently, electrically — and ran current through them across a range of voltages and frequencies.
Used as memory, the shiitake device switched electrical states up to 5,850 times a second at around 90% accuracy. Performance dropped as frequency rose but, much like an actual brain, recovered when they wired in more mushrooms. Published in PLOS ONE (LaRocco et al., 2025).
The researchers are honest that organic memristors are early, and a viable device would need to be far smaller than what they built. The interesting part is the economics. As LaRocco put it, everything you'd need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics.
We have a lot of opinions about shiitake. We did not expect one of them to be about RAM.
Read more → https://news.osu.edu/powered-by-mushrooms-living-computers-are-on-the-rise/
GENETICS
Every penicillin factory on earth descends from one mouldy melon
Penicillium was named Microbe of the Year 2026 by Germany's VAAM, which is a fair prize for a mould that has saved more lives than almost anything else we've made.
The origin story is familiar — Fleming's contaminated plate in 1928, Florey and Chain isolating the compound a decade later, a policeman named Albert Alexander treated in 1941 who improved dramatically and then died anyway, because the supply ran out. The part told less often is what happened next. That same year, researchers in Illinois isolated a Penicillium strain from a mouldy cantaloupe melon that produced far more penicillin than Fleming's. Every industrial penicillin producer in the world today descends from that melon. Global production runs around 50,000 tonnes a year, and all of it traces back to one piece of fruit.
That's a monoculture, and monocultures have a known failure mode. It's showing up first in cheese. The white rind on Camembert and Brie is Penicillium camemberti; blue cheese depends on P. roqueforti. French researchers report the industrial strains are losing vitality — degenerating after decades of asexual propagation. The proposed fix came out of a 2008 surprise: Penicillium, long assumed to reproduce only asexually, turns out to have two mating types. Crossbreeding tired production strains with fresh wild-type strains could rejuvenate them.
Which is an argument for wild diversity that has nothing to do with sentiment. Every strain in production anywhere is a narrowing — selected hard for one trait, propagated asexually, drifting quietly away from the range of the thing it came from. The wild population is the only place the lost variation still exists. You can't cross a strain back to health without something to cross it with.
Read more → https://vaam.de/en/microbiology-portal/microbe-of-the-year/microbe-of-the-year-2026/
References — University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa / SOEST (May 2026), Amend Lab — not peer-reviewed; framed as early-stage in the copy. · LaRocco J., Tahmina Q., Petreaca R., Simonis J., Hill J. (2025), Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics, PLOS ONE 20(10): e0328965. · VAAM (Vereinigung für Allgemeine und Angewandte Mikrobiologie), Microbe of the Year 2026: Penicillium.
