the.com/slime mold
a brainless blob that solves mazes and shames our subway planners
means A slime mold is a brainless, single-celled (or syncytial) organism that creeps along forest floors and decaying logs, oozing toward food and famously capable of finding efficient paths through mazes despite having no neurons at all.
from A straightforward English compound: "slime" (Old English slīm, the same gooey root that gives us slimy, related to a wider family of Germanic words for sticky muck) plus "mold," meaning fungus-like growth (from Old English molde-ish notions of rot and earth; the same "mold" you find on old bread). For centuries naturalists lumped these creatures in with fungi because they fruit and spore like them — hence the "mold" — but biologists later discovered they're not fungi at all, mostly amoeba-like protists. So the name is a fossil of an old mistake, accurate in spirit and wrong in taxonomy.
- no neurons
- Solves shortest-path mazes without a single brain cell
- tokyo test
- Recreated Japan's rail network in one day
- many selves
- A single cell can spread across square meters
- learns
- Remembers and avoids irritants despite zero nervous system
- old timer
- Thrived for hundreds of millions of years
physarum polycephalum — yellow slime mold that solved a maze faster than a mouse in a 2000 japanese study
fuligo septica — dog vomit slime mold, common in north american forests, produces bright yellow fruiting bodies
stemonitis splendens — dark purple columnar slime mold found in decaying wood across europe and north america