Mycelium

Our own attempts to emulate nature's structure-building capacity has thus far depended on 20th-century technologies such as extrusion and heat extraction, processes that brutalize small molecules to create crude polymerized structures. Ultimately through these processes we end up with products that are far inferior to nature's originals—pleather versus leather, particleboard versus wood and synthetic textiles, to name a few. Without nature's capacity for microassembly, the best properties of natural materials are lost.