"It is the year 2035. In a world facing climate catastrophe, the human enterprise is powered by fields of wind farms, with turbine blades made from fast-growing grasses and the roots of a million-year-old fungus.

It may sound like a scene from a climate-fiction movie, but polymer composites expert Valeria La Saponara, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has a vision to develop compostable, ecologically sound wind turbine blades from bamboo and mycelium, the fungal rootlike system that bears mushrooms. With seed funding from the College of Engineering’s Next Level strategic research vision and a grant from UC Davis Sustainability’s The Green Initiative Fund behind the initial phase of research, La Saponara, co-principal investigator Michele Barbato in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a diverse team of students and researchers in the Advanced Composites Research, Engineering and Science laboratory are testing a prototype on campus."

Read the full story at UC Davis News