James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Astrum Space · The Science Fact You've Been Taught for Years Is a Lie | Astrum Earth · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
These scientists shared something vital in common.
They had all worked with Suzanne Simard at some point in their careers.
Melanie Jones even co-authored the famous 1997 paper that started our story off.
Despite sharing Simar's belief in the wood wide web for years, these three tree experts had begun to get an uneasy feeling about where it was all heading, both in academic circles and the wider media.
So they did what any good scientist would do and ask the difficult questions, forcing themselves to look objectively, even if that meant casting doubt on their own research.
In a later interview,
Cass explained that they didn't initially set out to debunk any of Simard's claims about the Wood Wide Web.
Rereading the literature had forced them to face an uncomfortable truth about the fungal networks they had once put so much faith in.
Unnerved by what they found, the authors voiced their concerns in an article published in 2023, to great acclaim by the rest of the science community.
This article garnered almost as much attention as the 1997 study that had inspired it, and brought the dream of the wood wide web as we knew it to an abrupt end.
But what did the authors take so much issue with?
In their paper, Karst and her colleagues reviewed all research surrounding what they call common mycelial networks, which is just a more technical term for wood wide web, where mycorrhizal fungi connect the roots of the same or different plant species underground.
We'll call it the network from now on to make things simpler.
They identify three common claims that have been made about these networks and sorts to review each claim in turn to see if the evidence agreed.
The first one, namely that the networks are widespread in forests, was fairly simple to explore.
Many mycorrhizal fungi can and do form associations with lots of different host species, which would suggest that networks are common in forests.
However, there is a problem because we can't really observe these networks in situ, that is in the forest itself, as you would damage and fragment it before you could tell whether it was one continuous connection or not.
Each fungal strand is only about the width of a human hair after all.
There has been research mapping the presence of mycorrhizal fungi using techniques like machine learning.
But to actually know whether these fungi link together in one big continuous network across a forest, well, scientists would need to analyze the DNA of the fungi and the plant roots they attach to everywhere in the woods.
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