Government warning about Slime

The French government has issued an official warning about Slime. The warning comes from ANSES [Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail]. It bears the headline “Le Slime, une pâte très prisée mais pas sans risque.” Here’s a machine-translation of the first paragraph: “ANSES and the DGCCRF alert consumers to […]

Slime moulds and French motorway planning (new study)

Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, were jointly awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Transportation Planning prize for using slime mould to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks. See: ‘Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design’ in […]

Music of the Slime Moulds

“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 […]

Fudge on hagfish slime

Kathryn Knight writes in the Journal of Experimental Biology: Hagfish [pictured here, in a NOAA photo] don’t score high on the fish charisma scale. They are very unattractive, have a reputation for devouring victims from the inside out and, if attacked, they instantly release litres of repulsive slime. However, despite their repelling habits, Douglas Fudge […]

Slimy Hairs in A Sensor from Andy

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 […]

Slimeball: A sticky weapon to immobilize large ships

Slime would become the US military’s prime weapon to immobilise large ships under a scheme outlined for the US Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College. Lieutenant Commander Daniel Whitehurst, a student at the college, figured out how to combine a raft of existing technologies to produce the officially “non-lethal” armament he calls The Slimeball. He prepared a report in […]