Obviously, all the junk noncoding DNA most life is carrying around likely includes some coping mechanisms for whatever potential situations arise. Like there is the one town in Iran with something like ten times Earth’s nominal background radiation and people are fine living there.

Makes me a bit concerned when this kind of thing is talked about and researched. Probably my cynicism, but if it gets out that most species have some genetic tolerance in a significant portion of the population, the potential for nuclear weapons use increases dramatically. I believe it is likely that early life had a lot more exposure to radiation, so early ancestors likely evolved the machinery. When the vast majority of DNA is noncoding, I think the probability is high. We come at the medical issue backwards, playing wack-a-mole with symptoms, rather than building a full ontological understanding of biology. That level is still centuries away. Hopefully we are less primitive murder orgy fans by then. We survived the world war of chemicals, and physics that followed. If we survive the world war of computer science, the world war of biology will be the brutal final boss for the starting planetary level of Evo’ Universe. Who bets we can beat the game on one evo life?

FYI: The ability is photosynthesis but using radiation.

Protomolecule is happening

The science has moved on from the time we called it junk DNA. It’s definitely not junk and we now understand at least some of the reasons it exists.

The harms of radiation on humans are well understood. Of course, with high amounts of radiation we would likely evolve mechanisms to handle it, but that takes many generations. That fungus would have had many generations since the Chernobyl disaster happened, but we haven’t. So, you can’t really draw any conclusions about humans from this study.