Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He’s Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You’re Thinking"

SpaceX's new Fram2 mission is experimenting with growing mushrooms in microgravity — but not the magic kind.

A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before.

We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved.

Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight of its kind, the four-person team launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first-ever civilian mission flying over Earth's poles.

Chartered by Chun — and, of course, greenlit by SpaceX owner and resident White House psychonaut Elon Musk — the four-person crew launched on March 31 and are currently in orbit, working on nearly two dozen scientific experiments they have planned for their short journey.

Among them, as Ars noted, is the plan to become the first mushroom growers in space — but "they’re not the ones you’re thinking," Philips told the website. Instead, per a Fram2 statement released ahead of the launch, they'll be growing delectable oyster mushrooms.

FOODiQ Global, the Australian company behind the "Mission MushVroom" experiment aboard Fram2, said in the press release that "oyster mushrooms are the perfect space crop" because they grow rapidly and have tons of nutrients. They even have "the unique ability to make vitamin D," the statement noted.

Along with all those nutritional benefits, those yummy shrooms will almost certainly taste better than space food — if top space minds can figure out a way to cook them in orbit, that is.

In an op-ed for Business Insider, FOODiQ founder and CEO Flávia Fayet-Moore said that she identified mushrooms as an ideal in-orbit crop, particularly for years-long missions to Mars and other planets.

"Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years?" the space nutritionist — yes, that is apparently a real thing — wrote. "I can't."

We won't know how well the shrooms grew in microgravity until Fram2 gets back to Earth this week.

More on space life: Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals

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Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He's Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You’re Thinking"

Tesla Investors Suddenly Terrified as They Realize Musk Has Dug Their Grave

Elon Musk has saddled Tesla with huge

Tesla's horrendous first quarter numbers have some of its backers rethinking a few things. Namely, their CEO Elon Musk, whose once immense starpower is now inverting on itself.

Still haunted by last year's sales slump — the first annual drop in its history — Tesla has kicked off 2025 with a worrying omen that it may repeat the unwanted feat: a 13 percent drop in first-quarter deliveries. As the company faces widespread protests fueled by anti-Musk sentiment, the diagnosis is obvious.

"This is our first look at the impact of recent brand damage — and it appears to be the primary driver behind this quarter's delivery decline," Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster wrote on X, as spotted by Reuters. "These growth rates will likely deteriorate further this quarter." Annual deliveries, Munster predicts, will slip by 9 percent.

"I estimate brand damage cost Tesla around 80k deliveries in the quarter," Munster added in another tweet.

The problems are very much material, too. Musk made a big and brash gamble with the Cybertruck, a heterodox pickup truck with bold styling and an exorbitant price tag. And less than 50,000 of them have actually shipped — nowhere near the 250,000 units sold that Musk promised investors before the stainless steel trapezoids started rolling off the lot last year.

To some fans and investors, the big Cybertruck push was a slap in the face. They had long begged Musk for a small, affordable Tesla that could sell in high volumes. Instead, what they got was a vehicle that weighs 7,000 pounds and costs upwards of $80,000. Even if the fabled affordable EV does come, investors don't sound confident that Tesla will nail it. Gary Black, managing partner of Tesla shareholder The Future Fund, worries that if the cheaper vehicle is simply a barebones version of an existing model, this year's deliveries and profits "will go much lower," he told Reuters.

The rest of the Tesla lineup, meanwhile, is no longer as titillating in a market full of exciting EV options.

Tesla is also getting smoked by its Chinese competitor BYD, which recently usurped Musk's company as the world's largest EV automaker, selling over 4 million vehicles and raking $100 billion in revenue in 2024. Tesla sold 1.79 million and took in $97.7 billion over the same period.

It's impossible to ignore what Musk has recently positioned as Tesla's next big thing: the robotaxi business. At the unveiling event of a "Cybercab" prototype last year, Musk dubiously promised that pivoting into offering self-driving cabs would rake in trillions of dollars. But as the company struggles to refine its existing autonomous driving software options like Full Self-Driving, there's immense uncertainty over when — if ever — it can start rolling out such a vision.

All the while, the mere act of driving around in a Tesla has become stigmatized in a way that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago. Tesla cars and dealerships alike are being targeted with vandalism, while owners are ruthlessly mocked.

The degree of hate has surprised even Tesla skeptics. JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman, who has long been bearish on the company, said in a report Friday that first quarter deliveries confirm the "unprecedented brand damage we had earlier feared." 

But "if anything," Brinkman added, "we may have underestimated the degree of consumer reaction."

More on Tesla: Tesla Stock Is Soaring for the Funniest Possible Reason

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China Attacks Trump With Sassy AI-Generated Music Video

As the economy roils and tensions escalate, China has dealt a devastating blow to Donald Trump in the form of an AI music video.

As the world economy reels from President Donald Trump's so-called "reciprocal tariffs," the trade war between China and the US is escalating to new heights.

Nowhere is that more evident than in China's wild clapback in the form of an AI-generated music video blasting the United States, which came hours after Trump announced a 34 percent tax on Chinese imports.

The English-language China Global Television Network (CGTN) released the song, called "Look What You Taxed Us Through" ahead of Wall Street's worst single-day performance since 2020, during the throes of the pandemic. The song's lyrics are written from the point of view of an American consumer, blasting Trump's economic policy and daily life in the US more broadly. While the music video is AI-generated — a fact the CGTN advertises, unlike some American slopaganda — it also makes use of clips and audio from real sources like Trump rallies, Tesla protests, and American social media.

For many Americans, "Liberation Day," hailed by Trump's administration, means shrinking paychecks and rising costs. Tariffs hit, wallets quit: low-income families take the hardest blow. As the market holds its breath, the toll is already undeniable. #LiberationDay #CGTNOpinion pic.twitter.com/RzXFFVHoFg

— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) April 3, 2025

 

"Groceries cost a kidney, gas a lung. Your 'deals'? Just hot air from your tongue," the song opens, overlaid with B-roll from Tesla protests and audio from inflation-wary Americans. It continues: "Elon's satellites crash, Bezos' wealth sinks, the GDP's limping, the Fed's out of tricks, your 'patriot tax' made Wall Street sick."

While harsh remarks from US officials and mainstream media about China are nothing new, China rarely hits back with this much vinegar. Its appeal to US citizens to question their economy is clear: "CEOs buy yachts, we can't afford a stew!"

But Beijing's retaliatory strategy goes far beyond campy propaganda. China has matched the US' tariffs with 34 percent tariffs on its own, sharply escalating a seven-year trade war. It also announced controls on rare earth exports, which could be a major blow for American manufacturing, as China produces about 90 percent of the world's refined rare earth metal.

Unfortunately for people in the US, the CGTN's depiction isn't far off. Responding to the terrible rotten stock market dive, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell noted that Trump's tariffs are "larger than expected," adding that increased inflation, lost jobs, and stagnant economic growth are likely.

"We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation," Powell fretted.

US business leaders were a little less restrained.

"There will be blood," was the message from JP Morgan's Bruce Kasman, whose team released an analysis of the tariffs on Thursday. They warned that the risk of a recession has skyrocketed from an already uncomfortable 40 percent to a whopping 60. "At a basic level," Kasman's team calls the tariffs a functional tax increase on US citizens and businesses.

So far, Trump's tariffs have wiped $2.5 trillion in US stock market value, and it's anyone's guess when we might hit the bottom. At least we'll get some crafty Chinese propaganda when we do.

More on China: Tesla Forced to Change Name of "Full Self-Driving" in China, Since Its Cars Can't Fully Drive Themselves

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