“What Slime Knows” is an essay by Lacy M. Johnson, in Orion magazine: Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell […]
Audrey Dussutour is speaking about the blob: Blobs on the Mind Lots of other people are speaking about the blob, too—about the blob and intelligence. The blob is also known as “slime mold.” Intelligence is known to make people curious. Lots of this talking was inspired by the work of Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his colleagues, […]
Behold the slime mold known (to its human friends) as “Andi.” Andi’s friends arranged for Andi’s slinky movements to be set to bongo music. This is explained, all too briefly, on Medium. [vimeo]275415501[/vimeo]
Le Monde celebrates the work of two-time Ig Nobel Prize winner Toshi Nakagaki [here auto-translated from French to English]. The report begins: When ‘the blob’ develops according to the Tokyo rail network In the small community of blob enthusiasts, Toshiyuki Nakagaki is a reference. But his fame goes far beyond that. His work on the […]
Slime moulds (Physarum polycephalum for example) are quite dexterous when it comes to solving complex 2-D puzzles – their skills having been documented in research which led to the double Ig Nobel prizes (2008 & 2010) awarded to Toshiyuki Nakagaki [full details via here]. Now a new study performed by Alice Dimonte and Victor Erokhin […]
Tchaikovsky and Science In Seconds and some slime molds team up, sort of, to present this pasticcio performance: BONUS: Slime mold delights, for bread enthusiasts
“Physarum polycephalum, hereafter referred to as Physarum goo, inhabits cool, moist, shaded areas over decaying plant matter, and it eats nutrients such as oat flakes, bacteria and dead organic matter. It is a biological computing substrate, which has been enjoying much popularity within the Unconventional Computing research community for its astonishing computational properties.” [For a […]
Toshiyuki Nakagaki [pictured here], who has been awarded two Ig Nobel Prizes for studying the apparently intelligent behavior of slime mold, has (with colleagues) published a new study of apparently intelligent behavior in a very different creature: “Attempts to retreat from a dead-ended long capillary by backward swimming in Paramecium,” Itsuki Kunita, Shigeru Kuroda, Kaito Ohki and Toshiyuki Nakagaki, […]
Yet another new paper from the prodigiously productive Andy Adamatzky: “Slimy Hairs: Hair Sensors Made With Slime Mould,” Andrew Adamatzky, arXiv:1306.2935, June 13, 2013. The paper explains: “Slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large single cell visible by unaided eye. We design a slime mould implementation of a tactile hair, where the slime mould responds to […]
Two of the most eloquent Ig Nobel Prize winners will give free public talks at Future University Hakodate, Japan, on July 1, starting at 6:30 pm: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, winner of two Ig Nobel Prizes for his (and his colleagues’) various experiments with slime mold Koji Tsukada, co-inventor of the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s […]