Bricks: You know the old joke 'what room can't you go inside?' Well, it's not quite true, because 'mushroom bricks' can be used to construct buildings. In fact, bricks made by mixing together chopped-up corn husks and mycelium - the root network of fungi - were used to construct a 13-metre-tall tower called the Hy-Fi Installation in New York. Wood: While wood is one of the original grown building materials, it would be advantageous if we didn't have to cut down trees to get planks of it. Researchers at MIT have grown structures based on wood-like cells extracted from zinnia leaves, before culturing them and transferring the cells into a gel in order to 'tune' them. The potential to make usefully shaped 'wooden' pieces for buildings is enormous, but the research is in its early stages, so it will be a while before we see houses built with lab-grown wood.
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