Were you always good at solving the maze on the back of your Denny’s place mat? Are you an expert at finding your way through dungeons in RPGs? Well, don’t pat yourself on the back too hard — turns out you haven’t done anything a slime mold couldn’t do.
A scientist in Japan has been studying slime molds and has found some of them are surprisingly intelligent considering they don’t actually have brains. Certain species have consistently been able to find their way out of simple mazes, organizing their cells and growing their way along the most direct route towards a food source outside the maze. Some of the molds even seem to have the ability to “remember” stressful or traumatic things that have happened to them, such as major changes in temperature or humidity.
Atsushi Tero, the guy doing this research, claims what he’s learned about slime mold intelligence could be applied to the design of electrical and transport systems. I dunno though — somehow the discovery that things called “slime molds” are actually intelligent doesn’t seem like a good thing to me, but then maybe I’ve just watched The Blob a few too many times.
via The Telegraph