The fungi prefer to grow in cow dung. A newly described African species in the magic mushroom family confirms its evolutionary origin. 'Psilocybe ochraceocentrata' is found growing on cattle dung in the grasslands of southern Africa and Zimbabwe. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The discovery of a new magic mushroom species in Africa is forcing mycologists to take another look at the famous psychedelic fungi's evolutionary history.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external retrieved information, mitigating issues such as hallucination and outdated knowledge. However, RAG systems are highly sensitive to retrieval noise prevalent in real-world scenarios. Existing benchmarks fail to emulate the complex and heterogeneous noise distributions encountered in real-world retrieval environments, undermining reliable robustness assessment. In this paper, we define four categories of retrieval noise based on linguistic properties and noise characteristics, aiming to reflect the heterogeneity of noise in real-world scenarios. Building on this, we introduce Magic Mushroom, a benchmark for replicating "magic mushroom" noise: contexts that appear relevant on the surface but covertly mislead RAG systems. Magic Mushroom comprises 7,468 single-hop and 3,925 multi-hop question-answer pairs. More importantly, Magic Mushroom enables researchers to flexibly configure combinations of retrieval noise according to specific research objectives or application scenarios, allowing for highly controlled evaluation setups. We evaluate LLM generators of varying parameter scales and classic RAG denoising strategies under diverse noise distributions to investigate their performance dynamics during progressive noise encroachment. Our analysis reveals that both generators and denoising strategies have significant room for improvement and exhibit extreme sensitivity to noise distributions. Magic Mushroom emerges as a promising tool for evaluating and advancing noise-robust RAG systems, accelerating their widespread deployment in real-world applications. The Magic Mushroom benchmark is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aP5kyPuk4L-L_uoI6T9UhxuTyt8oMqjT/view?usp=sharing.

The birth of human consciousness may have truly been magic. Scientists have claimed that the consumption of the fungi psilocybin, also known as'magic mushrooms,' influenced pre-human hominids' brains six million years ago. They analyzed dozens of studies involving psilocybin and consciousness, finding the fungi increased connectivity between networks in the frontal brain region associated with expressive language, decision-making and memory. These'significant neurological and psychological effects' may have been the catalase ancient ancestors to interact with each other and the environment - spurring consciousness among our species. The idea that magic mushrooms sparked the pivotal point in humans has been touted by podcaster Joe Rogan, who has referenced the'Stoned Ape Theory' on his show multiple times.

A'hallucination machine' that sends your brain on a psychedelic trip without the need for drugs has been developed by scientists. Using Google Artificial Intelligence and a virtual reality headset, the device makes users hallucinate as if they have taken LSD or magic mushrooms. The machine was developed to help researchers better understand how the brain responds to altering realities. Brain scans taken on people using the machine could help determine if our'reality' is just a type of hallucination, the researchers claim. Through a virtual reality headset, the hallucination machine repeatedly shows selected images and patterns, such as a dog (top right) or colourful lines (bottom left) and spirals (bottom right) layered over reality.