Slime Mold: 0% Mold, 100% Amazing

Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff. It's very Josh Clarkey. It is kind of Josh clarky so much so that, um, as I was researching this, like I mean, I just kind of generally knew about slime mold that it exhibited, you know, some weird level of intelligence here there, but I didn't know much about it. And then as I was researching, I was like, I'm kind of into slime mold now, like all the different kinds of it. I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight

year old I never was. And then you're like, let me Clark this over to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes, uh yeah, I like slime old too. I think it's kind of cool. Uh, let's do it, okay, Chuck, I'm ready al right, everybody stand back because we are doing it. Yeah, and I think you could file this. I mean, it's not an animal, slime mold. I guess we should just tell you right away. It's not an animal. It's not a fungus, even though you would think it's a fungus

if you saw it on the forest floor. And we'll get to all this stuff, but it feels like an animal one of our animal episodes anyway, sort of. Yeah, I was gonna save the fact that it's not an animal or fungus or at the very end, but sure we could do it at the beginning. I get like, literally in the last minute, they were like, I still don't know what this is. An animal is it's a dog in disguise. You know everything we just told you about. It's not an animal, it's not even a fungus. And

then we just go to listener maw. Uh So what is it though, besides super ancient as in like maybe

one of the very first living things. Well, it's a protest actually, they figured out and protests seems to be, well, it's one of the five main kingdoms animal bacteria, plants, fun guy and then protests and protests are typically single celled organisms like amba um or protozoans, things like that, and they have I don't I couldn't find out exactly when they did it, but they fairly recently, I guess in the history of biology, fairly recently reclassified slime molds

from the Kingdom fun Guy over to the Kingdom Protista. Yeah, which is interesting because for years they have been studied by mycologists who are fun fun guys. And they found out later they were like, you know what, sorry, they should really go over to the protestologists, and they said, we kind of like these guys. Can we keep studying them since we have been And they said sure. In the protastologists were superbissed. They were they were. They're still

actually not over it. They're frequently t peeing the academic halls of the my collogists whenever they get the chance. It's very bitter battle. So um, that is pretty cute that they that the fun guy people are are still studying slime molds even though they're not Fun Guy. But um, there's you know, some good reasons why they were originally

considered to be fun Guy. Mostly that they're like these big kind of clumps, and there's all sorts of different ways that they take shape and form depending on the species. They're different colors. Some of them form kind of net like honeycomb structures. So the look like dog barf one of the main ones we'll talk about today looks a lot like dog barf. Um. They look like the fungus though, Like if you're walking in the woods and you saw this nine out it's in, people would say, well, it's

got to be some kind of fungus. Yeah, especially because if you're staring at them, you would have to stare at them for about five, six, ten hours to see that. They have a huge difference between them and fun Guy. And they move. They just move so slowly it's not apparent to the to the naked eye. But if you if you film these things with time lapse cameras, uh and speed it up, you can see, oh, they very clearly move about from place to place. So, um, that's

a big differentiator between them and fun Guy. But one of the reasons they thought they were like funger, that they were funkers because they produced spores to reproduce, right, and I mentioned their ancient origins. Uh, they are about a billion years old, and like I said, could be like as soon as there was stuff, it seems like there was slime mold eating basically eating the bacteria that breaks down other stuff that dies, and that's what they

feed on. Bacteria, mold, yeast, basically anything that decomposes dead things. Slime molds in gulf. I think it's it's not called photography. It's called phigot trophy. Oh yeah, it's a little It's not how I was going to say it, But what are we gonna trophy? Yeah, but I think you're absolutely right. Well, you know us, it wouldn't be as if we didn't.

Probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when you basically surround something and then gulf it and just sort of like move it into your body just like sort of absorb it basically. Yeah, which is another difference between slime molds and fungi, because funk i actually break the

food down and then absorb the broken down nutrients. But the fact is, if you have things that are decomposing other things like bacteria, molds, yeast, the things that that crawl onto or grow on dead people, dead trees, all that stuff to break them back down into their constituents. So the fact that those the slime mold feeds on other things, it makes it a really important part of the food web, part of the nutrient cycle, because other

things them along and eat the slime molds. Um. There's apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized jaw that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I think some kinds of insect larva eat them and then so it just kind of keeps going. But they're a really important part where you just have these microbes that like the beetle couldn't get to that they're able to basically get that energy from you know, the bacteria by eating the slime mold. Right, and even though other protests can

carry disease, slime mold is quite human friendly. Actually, uh, you can eat the stuff if you want. There's a dish in Mexico and some parts of Mexico called Coca de Luna, which is exactly what you think it is. Poop poop of the moon, moon poop, and uh, they eat this stuff. I even looked online to try and get a good recipe, but um, it's not on like the pages of Martha Stewart Living like it's you got to dive deep into Reddit and stuff like that to

get some good recipes. It seems like almost almost smacks of urban legend. But I'm seeing it in different enough forms that I think it's probable that it actually is a thing. The thing that scares me is that people say, like in some regions of Mexico, it's like, that's not super specific, you know. True. Uh, and and we pointed out they weren't animals or plants, but we definitely need to point out that slime old is also not mold

as a protest. That's right. So um. One of the one of the really amazing things about slime mold is, um, there's a couple of different kinds, as we'll talk about in a second, but one a whole bunch of different kinds of species. One type of slime mold can get really big. I mean, some of them can get up to the size of like a medium or pizza large pizza, I guess, depending on whether you're getting ripped off by your pizza guy. But like twelve inches in diameter. That's enormous, right,

So you're like, well, that's pretty cool. It's a big blob of mold. Well, put your sock carters on, because I'm about blow your socks right off your feet. Some of those types of slime mold that are as big as a pizza are one giant cell. Yeah, I mean, this is truly amazing. The plasmodial slime mold, which is I guess you could call it one of the true

slime mold. Is it has all the stuff like as if it were undergoing cellular division, and all the all the different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all that stuff. But it's just not it doesn't have cell walls. It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and

lives inside this giant fortress wall. Yeah. It's almost like if you took all the cells that should have made this giant blob um up as a multicellular organism and just kind of broke them open and dumped all the contents into this blob and then through the cell walls away. That's what you would have it's it's interesting, it is, and it's it's really kind of straightforward if you if you just hear it. But it's also really easy to to just keep going like wait, wait, why why is

it like dead? And how is it like this? What's going on here? Which is one of those things that it just it makes slime old. It's its own thing. And we're still learning about this stuff, you know, every day. Yeah, and it I mean it gets there's quite a few times in here where we're gonna say, and here's where it gets even crazier. Uh, this isn't super crazy. But the the other kind of slime mold um or the other big broad categories a cellular slime mold, and these

are lots of individual, single celled organisms. But the kind of knockout fact about them is when they're stressed out, if they don't have a lot of food around, they can join up together and sort of look like one of those plasmodial slime molds. But it's not. It's called I guess pseudo plasmodial yeah, because it's not a real one. But it basically says, all right, we're gonna all come

together to try and find food together. And then when they do have food, they can be like, all right, we'll just go along our merryway and split up again, yeah, which is pretty nuts. They also will come together, um Apparently it makes it harder for predators like those specialized beetles to eat them, because those individual slime molds can be you know, a millimeter in size or smaller. Um, So it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that. It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the

size of like, you know, a quarter. Right, So they actually do come together. They come together to move. They also come together to reproduce and produce spores. But the characteristic of this that what makes it a pseudoplasmodium rather than actual true slime mold, is that they retain their cell walls, their individual cells when they come together. They just kind of loosely formed together. In a really good way of understanding what this the cellular slime molds created,

it's kind of like a swarm. Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I think. Or what's the god that my favorite thing when the birds do that, what's that called? Uh flock of seagulls haircut? That's it? Uh

uh boy, you threw me there. So these the plasmodium is covered by a layer of slime, and you're gonna want to put a pin in this because when they do move around, they leave behind a little these little collapse tubules and it looks basically like not exactly like a snail trail, but sort of like a layer of slime. And you're gonna want to remember that for later on, because he's actually kind of served as important little markers.

As a matter of fact, write, write it down. Everybody will wait until you get a pen, a piece of paper. Go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah, put on your mask by pen, yep, by a piece of paper. Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for that pen. Really, oh my god. Pin mark up as big as CDs. I think the general mark up as CVS fairly high. They're like, we get him in here for the aspirin, then we really juice them with this ballpoint pen. I hope there's no CBS ads in this episode,

but we'll find out. What is what's a good deal at a drug store? Is there like a zero? They all mark it up? Yeah, everything's marked up because it's like it's like convenience kind of thing. You sound like a lot of sound like a grandfather. It's all marked up. Back in my day, you just go to a regular grocery store and buy your pens from the ben factory, straight from the man who made It's right. Uh. You know, when I was little, we would uh for a short time.

I'm not sure why we did this, because it's not like we lived out in the country and this is a very old timey country thing to do. We bought our milk direct from a farm and we would pull up and and uh, I would get to walk inside this huge walk in cooler, like next to a loading dock, and I just thought it was like the coolest thing in the world. Somehow to get that fresh milk. Sure

didn't they. They back the cow up and it makes a beeping sound, and they just scored the milk right into the back of your station Wagon's right, they mark it up first, wash your way home. Uh so where were we? Okay? If you do see this stuff in the woods, if you ever hiking along and you see a big or medium size pizza like yellow blob or orange blob, they can be red. They can be white. They can be maroon very rarely, they can be black, blue, or green, but usually it's sort of yellow or an orange.

And you see that in the forest, you're probably looking at a slime mold. Yeah, especially if it's really hot out and it just rained. Yeah, the the worst thing in the world for me. You can also see them like on your grass too. Apparently if it gets really rainy and hot, slime molds will actually come out of the woods into your grass and be like, oh, this is pretty nice, and um, they aren't gonna do any harm. That's not a problem for your grass. It just looks

kind of gross. It's certainly not gonna hurt you or your pets. And then eventually it'll dry up and turn to kind of a gray or tamp powder and blow away, and that means that it just turned into spores and

it just reproduced all over your place. Yeah. I think maybe we should take a break because right now people are probably like, dudes, you promised greatness here and so far it's a little hum drum what So put those soft garters back on, because when we come back, we're really going to start knocking them off with some of these amazing facts Okay, Chuck, we set them up. Let's knock him back down. So here's one cool fact is that slime molds basically can do the equivalent and do

the equivalent of throwing themselves the grenade. Uh. They will sacrifice themselves to save others. And these are things without a brain or a central nervous system. Like, it's not like they think, I'm feeling empathy today for my fellow mold and so I'm gonna save everybody because I've come

across some infectious bacteria. But what they do is they come across it, they engulf it, and then they say, let me go, and they cut themselves off from the pack, from the swarm and detach themselves and die of that infection, but save the rest of the group. And um, my heart will go on place in the background as they get further and further away, exactly. That's that's altruism, Yeah, which is pretty amazing considering, like you said, they don't have a brain or anything like that. So how how

are they doing this? We'll get to that later. So what about tell everyone about the uh dicti stelli um disc discoitus disc discoides. Okay, that's one of my favorite words now disco Whiteyscau's disco in it. So that this was this is a kind of um cellular um slime mold, right, So it's made up of a bunch of different individual

organisms that come together. And when they come together they practice altruism to some degree as well, because some of them will basically be like, Okay, I'm dead, now I'm dead. I'm gonna turn into a bundle of cellulose fibers, and that cellulose is going to connect with other slime mold cells that have died and turned into cellulose and come

together and form a stalk. And then the top of the stalk, a bunch of different um slime mold cells they're called slugs when they're individual like that, will climb up the stalk and then they'll turn into spores. And then in that way they're sticking up out of the ground and a passing animal will come and they'll stick to it and it'll get a ride to greener pastures. But to do that, some of them have to die to form this talked to to let the spores grow

on top of which is pretty amazing itself. It is uh And you know we mentioned that they move. You know, they're not. They don't just sit around and wait for someone to drop a pepperoni near their pizza shape and the woods so they can eat it. They gotta go where the food is. And they either moved by these little appendages that like little feet like appendages. Those are the cellular slime olds, the individual single celled organisms that can come together, or and this is crazy, the the

other kind. They move as one big mass because you know, there's no cell wall going on, so they just sort of expand and contract the cytoplasm to kind of gush their way along the ground very slowly. Yeah, which is really neat to see because when they're especially when they're searching for food, which is basically all they're ever doing. Everything that they do is either to get away from some noxious stimuli or to go toward food. Usually to go toward food. It sounds like us it basically I

don't like that, but I like that smell. I'm gonna go toward that. So um. They make these amazing kind of they look almost like sea fans, you know what I'm talking about That they look very fractally and they just kind of they fan out. Is the best way to put it, when they start to go look for food, and when they do find food, they start moving toward it.

It's the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way, and next thing, you know, over a very long period of time, five days later, the the slime mold has moved. And actually slime molds um if you don't they like they they're totally fine living in peatree dishes for as long as you want them to um, as long as you feed them. If you stop feeding them, they'll just get out of the peatree dish and start looking for

food elsewhere, so they'll they'll escape. Yeah, but I mean again, it's not like you're just sitting there watching this thing crawl out of it's petrie dishes. You leave overnight and you forget to feed the thing and you come back and it's half of it is out onto the table or something like. It's something like a bread out of gremlins kind of you. And I think you said they moved about a millimeter an hour, but some of them actually, if they're really cooking, can go about an inch and

a half in an hour, which that's really fast. I mean, it doesn't sound fast. But when you're talking about what we're talking about, it is pretty fast. Yeah, um, and I saw that a couple of places. Most people cite something like a millimeter an hour. I can't remember which one goes that fast, but yeah, I mean, you can't see it moving when you're staring at it, but over time you can for sure. You know, if you're just really patient and you can lock in on something, you

might be able to see that. So when they started figuring out in the early two thousands, of Japanese researchers were some of the first to like really study slime molds as as showing some sort of intelligence. They figured this out from you know, from watching these things actually move about and when you when you film them and um that like high speed and then replay it, you can see their movements are deliberate in a lot of ways. They're they're not just blind dumb movements where they happen

on to um food. They clearly consense food somehow or some way, and they spread out um and they seemed to spread out and again in a really deliberate way. And so some some researchers started to um test slime molds to see what they were capable of. One of the first one one of the first researchers was a Japanese scientist named toshi Yuki Nakagaki, and UM, I think

so too, and Dr Nakagaki, which is even better. Um built a maze, like a pretty simple maze, but in actual three dimensional maze and a good sized peach tree dish put um what what has come to be known as probably the smartest size slime mold, Farium polycephalum, which is kind of like the rock star of the slime mold world these days, put a psarium in it and said, go to town, go find your little favorite oat flake treat,

which is their their favorite food. Yeah, And the key here is is there were four different routes to two different endpoints where this food was. It wasn't just like there's only one way to solve this maze. And so they put the little oat flake at these endpoints, and uh, the microorganisms that grow on the oat flakes is what they're after. That's not like they love oatmeal or anything

like that. And so he put them there and studied them, and over the course of hours, these things basically learned to get to that food in the quickest fastest way every single time. Yeah, like it could, it could conceivably get to it, like you said, four different ways, but that fast way was the way that it would. Just like, that's impressive. That that's definitely not worthy. You can write

multiple papers on that kind of study. And so another Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sack, a researcher name at Sushi Taro from Okkaido University. Did you like that? Yeah, that's good? And um Dr Tiro said, all right, what about this? What if we take some oat flakes and basically make a general map of the neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime old does

with that? Put a little slime old in a petrie dish with these oat flakes that kind of mimic the neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched to go I think over the course of like four or five days. Right, yeah, and you might think cool. It does what it does and it goes after that food in the most direct

way possible, which is what it did. But here's where it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they overlaid a map of the current Tokyo Railway commuter system, the subway system, and they laid it over this grid the slime and it was almost a perfect match. That nuts, that's I mean, I had to reread that like five times to even believe that that's what happened. That this line basically figured out the most efficient route to get

around essentially Tokyo. Yes, which I mean humans had figured out too, but it took teams of human engineers and a very long time for them to figure this out. Right, So the slime mold was just like, this is this is nothing. What else you got? You got any more cities that are more densely populated with more neighborhoods, because I'll just make your subway maps all day long basically, and they're like, Tokyo is probably one of the most debts, right, Okay.

I saw another um another similar kind of a bit of research chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. This is this is crazy. It's like an archaeological study, um. And they put some they six some fiserium on it and fis um on it, and it mimicked ancient Roman roads that had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten,

and ones that were well known in the Balkans. It mimics these these Roman roads like things that people have been like, Okay, this is the best route from this city to this city. The slime mold did basically the same thing and and apparently revealed some lost stuff. Yeah, I mean, I guess it could. Also It's interesting like if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment like this, does that mean like the humans get it wrong? Like can they use this as a test and be like, sorry,

the slime old is spoken. I guess so. I kind of like the octopus picking the World Cup. You know, they always take the World Cup away if the other team that the octopus didn't. Yeah, well, I wonder if you I mean, and we'll get to the real applications of this, but I wonder if they could do something like that where they let's say they look at the Tokyo system in a couple of places that didn't match,

They're like, we totally should have gone this way. Yes, I feel like that that is the direction that people are kind of going in that they could conceivably use this for planning new stuff. You know. Wow, So every city planner we'll have a slime mold researcher at their best. Yeah, I mean, like, this is crazy. Why not? You know, all you have to do is have some oat flakes and a Petri dish and you're good. So I think

we should take another break. What do you think? Quite frankly, we want to eat some oat flakes right about now. I'm kinda in the move for that too. We'll be right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes? I did not. All right, we'll get you something, because here's the secret, everybody, when we take a break, we don't really go take a break. No, we should have had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and just eating them real quick. I I don't know, I

can't see. So all right, we've said that these things don't have brains. They don't have and I don't think we mentioned that. It's not like they have like it's not like their jellyfish and they have some sort of weird neural net. They got nothing like that at all, nothing like they have no way of of generating consciousness in any form that we recognize. And yet slime old is teaching us to open and open our horizons um in hearts to sure two new ideas of what constitutes

consciousness and intelligence. You know what I'm saying, Like it makes sense as a swarm, as a bunch of cellular as cellular slime mold makes sense. We're already familiar with the hive mind, and you know, the emergent property of a bunch of different things, you know, operating together. The real puzzler, though, is the the single cell plasmodial slime mold that's one big giant cell and the fact that it behaves in ways that seemed conscious to some degree. Yeah.

So if you want to kind of go back in time to where a lot of this rearch research started, it wasn't actually in Japan, but it was in the nineties sixties physicist named Evelyn Fox. Keller was curious if she could use math to model biological systems because they had had success using math to explain and expand our understanding of physics. So she was like, let me see if we can do this with biology, and someone said, well, you gotta meet Lead Siegel. Siegel, is you got a

little surprise for you? And Lee Siegel got together and said, oh, Dr Keller, you need to meet our end slime mold. And Dr Kell is like, this is the nineteen sixties. I don't know what slime mold is yet. And Keller and sorry Siegel said oh, we'll just take a seat and let me tell you about this, uh, which is dicto dictio still stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictio stellium disc goidium.

I think the discoids discoidium Yeah, okay, but it's the one we were talking about earlier that that creates the stems. They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the sports, right. And I think this was just significant because it was kind of like the first time anyone had observed and you know, fell off of their lab stool and could explain it to others, these pseudo plasmodiums. But what they were missing was they were like, all right, we see

this happening, and it's amazing and how are they doing this? Though? And the very first thing they thought of is like, maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell or maybe a few of them. They get together and they just sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and say go this way, and the rest are just sort

of the worker ants that follow along. Yeah, And they knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical a MP, which is related to a t P, the dino cine triphosphate um, and that that was how they were signaling. But they thought that that like you're saying, that there are just a few signaling, everybody else was responding. And what they figured out is that that they had

that totally wrong. That there weren't leaders, There weren't pacemakers who were in charge of like you know, signaling and an effect making decisions for the group. That it was actually like a group effort, and that the the whatever um whatever cell or slug that they're called in this

cellular slime mold swarm was closest to food. It would signal with a MP that hey, there's some food over here, let's all go over this way, and that signal would just kind of be passed along through the swarm, through the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move toward the food and start eating. Yeah, and this was you know, I mean, you can see why they went in that initial direction because it made sense, and a lot of nature is organized with the top down principle.

In mind, humans often organized with the top down principle big business, government. It's just a it's a system that we're used to seeing in in nature and in people, and so it made sense that they went that way, and they never they never really thought about the fact that it could be like, no, there, Uh, it's a total bottom up system and whatever is closest can sig send out these signals. Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy, it's more like, um, it's like it's like how a

flock of birds operate. So a flock of seagulls haircut operates where they run so far away. Yeah, but it's the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from is the first to run and everybody else follows. Is kind of like how a flock of birds will turn depending on you know, which way they need to turn based on that bird making that decision, and the rest of the flock flock basically following it to bottom up, bottom

up decision making kind of thing. And so we started to learn a lot and we know a lot about bottom up decision making now as opposed to when these guys were working back in the sixties, I think UM.

But in the twenty one century, that whole idea of bottom up decision making or decentralized UM decision making UM has become a real component in in UH artificial intelligence design because if you've listened to the End of the World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the hardest things in the world to do is program something to understand everything, because you have to input all the stuff it needs to know. Whereas if you can just kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to

let the machine think for itself, you you finally got something. Yeah, and I would imagine I didn't see this anywhere, but it seems like this might could have some applications in nanotechnology as well, like the idea that we could program, you know, billions of tiny little nanobot bugs to clean the windows of your house every day, like a lot of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Uh am I base there or could that potentially be a thing? Not at all. I think it totally could be a thing.

It's it's anytime you have a huge amount of things that you're trying to all get to do roughly the same thing, but they need to not you know, uh, redouble their efforts or um replicate their efforts. So you don't want one cleaning one part of the window and the other one coming over and cleaning the the same

part of the window that's already clean. Um. All you have to do is figure out how to teach them if if this happens, do this, and if you can figure out how to strip it down to a basic enough algorithm that could conceiveable be used for just about any situation. Um, you've got the key to the universe in your hand. Like there's actually we'll have to do a um An episode on it one day. But I read an article about a guy who was I think he was a physicist back in the eighties who was like,

I think the universe is basically an operating system. That is that is that it goes down to two. There's two bits. You could say it's black and white, one or zero, it doesn't matter, but there are two kinds of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form, everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime, mold, everything comes out of these two types of bits that basically make up the fabric of space and time, interacting

with one another and increasingly sophisticated patterns. And that is exactly what you're talking about. So if we can figure out what that that computation is, what those algorithms are that give rise to larger and larger stuff, you can you can do anything. It's it's weird you can do increasingly sophisticated stuff. The more basic your algorithm is. It's almost a paradox. Yeah, this is like Dr Octagon stuff. Dr Octagon. I don't know, is that right from? Yeah?

He was Alfallina? You mean sure? All right? I like Alpha Malina. I think he makes some really weird choices for parts. I'm sure somebody's like, hey, we'll give you ten million dollars to play Doctor Octagon. I'd be like, sure, you got it. Where do I sign up? Yeah? I need to get him a movie crush because he actually is friends of the network. He's a friend of the network. I think he's been on The Daily's Eye Guist a few times, and like they booked him on some other

comedy shows. I'm like, guys, they're a little Malina My way for real, Malina spread all over Movie Crush. You've been on daily s Eite guys twice. I've never have. I've been on movie Crush too. Ad Miles on the movie Crush the other day and I was giving my hard time because they haven't asked me on and twice. It's hilarious. Keep it up, chuck. Yeah, he was like, uh no, man, I was like, Miles, did he really

you flustered him? I feel like he was on skates for a second here, but I let him off the hook. I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really like going full court press here. Yeah. Miles is like man beat beyond guard, chucked his not pull punches. It's funny because Miles, you know, as you know, is such a smart, smart guy and uh just like having a conversation with him is always amazing. And then he comes on and he picks Mall Rats. What's his favorite movie? Was it? Really?

That's his favorite movie of all time? Huh? I mean that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man, I never said I had good tastes. It's pretty fun. Do you have any hints of what Jack's is going to be? Well? I know it's pulp fiction because he he had me save it like two years ago, and I just you know, he kept slipping through the crack. So he's gonna come on next week for pulpiction. All right, So let's get back to I mean, we talked about how the uh, the d D as we're gonna call it,

moves around with yeah, without a the pacemaker cells. But that original true slime mold, the big single celled one that's just made up of all the goopy cytoplasm. We didn't really talk about what they do. And because if you don't have cell walls, you're like, well, how's this stuff moving around? It's actually made up of what's called oscillating units. And so these units oscillated different frequencies depending what's going on, like where they are, and then what

the their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so when they go close to food, they start oscillating and shaking like hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food, and then that just sort of gets that flow. Everyone else starts oscillating in a similar manner, and that gets that

flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction. Yeah, and so the slime mold effectively moves to the food because of that that oscillating unit that looks again like a fan spreading out going to find food and then finding it, the slime mold moves toward it or like you said, away from something that they don't like. Ye yes, um, which is pretty neat. So so those are the two things. It's moving towards food and moving away from something and um.

One of the things that they found is that slime old can actually um learn and not only learn to like stay away from something, it can actually teach other slime mold um to stay away from it, even slime mold that's never been introduced to it. Or alternately, it can teach this is the really the thought garter. Uh. In fact, it can teach other slime mold that something that seems harmful is actually harmless. This is a pretty cool experiment. Yeah, So these researchers put slime molds, uh.

They built a little tiny bridge, was very cute, and they coded this bridge and a noxious substance. It wasn't harmful to them, it was harmless. It was like salt or something, let's say. And then they put the little those little oat flakes on the other side as their ultimate temptation. And so these first slime olds start creeping up to it and sort of dip in their little toe in the water and saying, uh, this stuff is pretty notious. But then they learned, right, like, okay, so

it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff. And what they found was that it learned to cross this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on. Right, So it said, Okay, this stuff's fine. It's he's gross, is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me. So I'm gonna get to food just as fast. Right. That's pretty amazing in enough self, but gets crazy, yes, right, they we need like a banner matter nole to come

in and say that. Um. So they they take the slime mold and break it apart and fuse it together with other slime molds that have never been exposed to this noxious stuff before. They're called naive and the other ones are called habituated. And those naive ones when they encounter this noxious stuff like a salt bridge for the first time, they don't approach it with trepidation. They go right across it as fast as the habituated ones that

it's fused to. This is really weird because this is the first time the stuff is encountering it, and they think that somehow the habituated slime molds are passing on the information like no, no, we know it's gross, but it's actually fine to the naive slime molds. And they figured out, Chuck, that it doesn't matter if you take three habituated slime molds infuse them with one naive slime mold, or take three naive slime molds and one just one

habituated slime mold. It's going to approach us and move across it just as fast as as either in either situation. Yeah, and then they also sort of figured out how long this took. So the naive slime molds they separated after an hour of fusion with those uh habituated I'm gonna call them in the no molds, and it forgot. It forgot that the coding was harmless and it sort of had to approach it with a little more trepidation. But if they had been fused for three hours or more

and then separated it, it remembered. I mean it technically can't remember, but they do have this weird sort of memory uh that works. And I think they even figured out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave behind access sort of like a spatial memory, because they come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already been here before me, right, so there's no reason to

go research this area because clearly wasn't food there. Yeah, and again here's your ten minute reminder that slime mold don't have brains or neuron So all of this is just just astounding stuff that we're still trying to get to the bottom up, like that habituation thing. They're like, we don't know, we have no idea, but we're gonna go find out and maybe in ten years we'll be

able to explain it. Right, So eventually, um, you know, the people that are people that are hipped to the slime mold mold thing are like trying to spread them that. They're trying to spread the word and me, like, this stuff is really amazing. They're doing Ted talks on it. It It was a really good Ted talk on it, in fact, and some coders said, hey, wait a minute, you know they're doing all this amazing stuff like the overlay of

the Tokyo subway and it's lining up perfectly. What if we actually generated code of the slime mold and kind of reverse engineered it and and we could see what that look like and how we could use it. So yeah, this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured out um

or took. I don't know exactly who figured out exactly what the the slime mole old um algorithms were, but somebody wrote them down and Sage Jensen came along and turned them into a C plus plus code and basically ran these things it's like algorithms, and found that these fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold, moving across the peat tradition search of food, which is

pretty cool in and of itself. It was art art project basically, but some someone on a team of astrophysicists heard about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when they were stumped trying to figure out how to map them the invisible matter that makes up basically the structure of our universe, that that if we can just crack that nut, will understand the universe exponentially better than we do now, but we cannot figure out how to do it.

And so, just like with the ancient roads between the Roman cities or the Tokyo subway map, someone figured it out to use slime mold to basically try to try to create the structure of the universe that's invisible. These invisible filaments. Yeah, these filaments that came out of the Big Bang. So I guess they went back to Sage Jensen and said, uh, first of all, stage U C plus plus code, isn't there really just be minus code? For being honest? And he said, that's not how it works.

Get out of most great coding joke. Uh, thank you. It's my only coding joke. And I just made it the only coding joke I think. No, I think it's not a bug. It's a feature, isn't that one's? Um? So yeah, they went to Sage and they said, you're an artist, but this is pretty amazing. I think we can apply it here, and they modified it and what

they did was and of course there's always oats involved. Um, they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells, and they put it on a map with thirty seven thousand real galaxy and they used I guess virtual piles of food to represent the galaxies, and the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the pile of food. And so they did this modeling through the coating and had the virtual slime olds seek out the most efficient way to reach this, and I guess in theory they're hoping that they get

a sort of map of the universe out of it. Yeah. So so when the slime hold was finished, they all stood background, that's amazing, How accurate is it? And they all just realized that they had no idea how but no, surely, Like I think what they're doing is they're taking this as an initial, you know, guide, and then they'll go back and try to figure out how to verify it.

And maybe the slime old did figure out the most efficient way to link together these galaxies, but that would be I can't even put a word on that of what that would how impressive that would be if the slime mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together, the structure of it. You know, what if slim old does God? What if we your sleep right now and

this is all just one dream? Chuck? Uh? The other cool thing they figured out with the slim old moving around is when they were researching them, they found that they those mazes that they were running them through, they went even faster through the maze when they had some sort of noise like a bright light or something like

we said. They like to go away from things they don't like, and that negative input of that light basically made them say, all right, let's let's pick up the pace and make make these decisions quicker and get to that food and stop fussing around. I don't like this light staring at me. I think we kind of blew some minds today. I think so. My mind's definitely been blown. Did you want to cover the Amazon thing? Nope? Okay, good. Uh that's it for slim unless you've got anything else

right now? Do you? I got nothing else. We'll have to revisit this in ten years. And thanks to Dave Ruse for helping us with this one. Um. And since I to Dave Rouse, I think chuck it means it's time for a listener mail. Hey guys, I'm gonna call this night trap response. I just laugh every time I hear those words together. Now, No night trap. This is from Aaron, Hey, guys, just finish the Night Trap video Game show. Thanks for bringing it to everyone. I own

the twenty five anniversary edition. Like you said, it's not a good game, but has its moments. One other game worth noting is called Double Switch. It said the same style and video camera control quality, and it started Corey Hame. Perhaps arguably a little better game, but still had the same thing going on. Really, I'm sure your research and its lots of things that don't quite make it into the final show. Uh, Aaron, we did not know about

Double Switch, So nice work there. And Aaron says, I've listened to so many shows it feel bit Chuck and I are some sort of long lost brothers separated at birth. Generally agree with just about everything he says, and I'm always fully entertained. It would be nice to meet you guys if you ever get another tour started and make it back to Michigan. Keep up the good work. I finish your book, and I have the pre order poster in my office and I've converted friends and family. So

that is from Aaron in Michigan. And we're definitely gonna start touring again. I would say probably next year, although we haven't really talked much about it, no, but we need to. It's definitely starting to get to be time to to get talking, I guess, although I gotta admit I have not missed the traveling. I've missed being on stage, but not the traveling part. Well, you know that's what they say, that's what rock stars say. It's not the heat,

it's the humidity. Now they say that. You know, you get paid to travel, you don't get paid to play shows. I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense. Yeah, if you can figure out how to get paid for both, then you're really really doing something right. Good stuff. Yeah, and if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit. We've had a lot of calls over here for ann Arbor, so maybe that's where we go. Yes, um, well who is that again? Aaron? Aaron? That's what I was gonna guess.

Thanks a lot, Aaron. That was a great email. Thanks for the Corey Hame reference and all that stuff. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Aaron did, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know is a production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.