This unassuming mushroom, Amanita phalloides, looks an awful lot like some safe, edible mushrooms—but one unfortunate collector discovered that it makes delicious but deadly soup. The fungus’s powerful toxin kills liver cells in a matter of hours. Amanita has been spreading in California since it was accidentally introduced from Europe in the 1930s. Scientists are trying to teach people to recognize them, and to and stop their spread.
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Eliene Augenbraun is a multimedia science producer, formerly Nature Research's Multimedia Managing Editor and Scientific American's senior video producer. Before that, she founded and ran ScienCentral, an award-winning news service providing ABC and NBC with science news stories. She has a PhD in Biology. Follow Eliene Augenbraun on Twitter