Slime Mold Gives Thanks for Mexico-Shaped Oat Flakes

Remember the researchers who used slime molds to compute the most efficient transportation routes for the Japanese Rail system? Well break out the oat margaritas, because someone sent the slime molds south of the border on the same mission, and this time, they made a movie . . . .

As you can see, some crafty human created a Mexico-shaped coral in a petri dish with oat flakes (Asda’s Smart Price Porridge Oats, the paper notes) located at the major cities. The seed slime was placed at Mexico City. The slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, is like a giant amoeba that is actually eating the bacteria living on the oats, not the oats themselves. After it polishes off a meal, it sends out slime en masse. If it can’t find any food within a reasonable distance, it retreats. If it can find food, it collapses from a spread-out sheet of slime into a single transport conduit. And somehow, the bag of cytoplasm calculates the most efficient routes for the network.

If you look carefully between the oat flakes, you’ll see permanent conduits left behind, optimized for distance. Sometimes their solution for the oat-flake network is different from ours, sometimes the same. In the case of Mexico, the slime mold’s solution matched humans’ solutions pretty closely. Ironically enough, when posed the same problem for Great Britain, the slime mold came up with some alternative routes for one of the world’s most legendarily efficient transportation systems. Read more about this particular study here, or the original research here.

Now if we could only find a way to use Physarum to take back Mexico from its out-of-control drug gangs. You know, like in The Blob. But with more oats.

For those of you in the states, have a Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all you readers — It is nice to know you enjoy hearing my thoughts on the things I love. I’ll be away from North America until next Wednesday on vacation, but I’ll have some very exciting news for you then.