Brew beer, of course! That's what a Cal Poly researcher did. The amber deposit may be as old as 45 million years, and had over 2000 different microorganisms trapped inside, including a yeast which, although a bit choosy in its carbon diet, still was able to ferment and make beer.
In other cool myco-news, an article just came out in PLoS ONE about the speed of spore discharge in some coprophilous fungi. It turns out that some fungi can shoot their spores at speeds up to 55 miles per hour. Among those fungi examined was a species of Pilobolus, the hat-throwing zygomycete (not the dance troupe), which is an important part of any intro mycology lab, and which has a very cool mechanism for shooting its spores straight up into the air for maximal dispersal.
To view the action, Yafetto et al. used a camera with an amazing 250,000 frames per second capture rate!
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