Edible fungi

The 2nd Panhellenic Truffle Festival begins tomorrow, Thursday, October 10, in Kalambaka. The events will take place at the Riga Feraiou Square and will last until Sunday, October 13.

The annual truffle hunts in central Greece will kick off on March 1, when the truffle hunting season opens, the Natural History Museum of Meteora and the local Mushroom Museum who are organizing the event announced Wednesday.

The season begins in March and ends in October and each "hunt" lasts approximately three hours.

Some species of wild mushrooms in Bavaria are still heavily contaminated with radioactive Caesium-137 more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, DPA reported.

One of the deadliest fungi in the world was discovered in northern Australia - thousands of miles from their native habitat in the mountains of Japan and Korea.

 The Poison Fire Coral was discovered in a suburb of the northern Australian city of Cairns by a local photographer and subsequently identified by scientists, James Cook University told AFP.

Beekeepers from the Cherelare village of Orehovo found a mushroom worthy of the Guinness Records. The mushroom is an impressive 10 kilograms.

Greek truffles, one of the most expensive commodities on the international market, are quietly winning over aficionados around the world.

Although commercial activity in Greece is still in the fairly early stages, the country's truffles have started attracting connoisseurs of international gastronomy and are slowly but steadily reaching important markets abroad.

An Italian national has been fined 466,509 Turkish Liras, equivalent to about 122,200 U.S. dollars, for trying to take 28,960 kilograms of white truffle, a tasty tuber in great demand, out of Turkey without permission, according to a statement by the Istanbul Regional Directorate of Forestry.

An invasion of Polish people picking up mushrooms ruined the teachings of an American tank unit near the western city of Jagan, RIA Novosti reported.

Scientists have discovered that the Dictyophora mushroom species that grows on dried lava in Hawaii gives women spontaneous orgasms when they sniff it. The mushrooms aphrodisiac powers were first studied in 2001 by John Halliday and Noah Soule who published an article in IFL Science.

More than 40 people have been poisoned by wild mushrooms in Greece over the last month, one of whom has died, health authorities said on Wednesday.