Name: Brainless Slime Molds Navigate Mazes and Make Decisions
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

Nova

Meet the charismatic slime mold Physarum—which can learn, make decisions, and go through mazes without a brain—and the researchers studying it.

Can a slime mold find food placed at the far end of a labyrinth?

Brainless Slime Molds Navigate Mazes and Make Decisions

Koch Foundation

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Meet the charismatic slime mold Physarum—which can learn, make decisions, and go through mazes without a brain—and the researchers studying it.

Can a slime mold find food placed at the far end of a labyrinth?

Nature

Brainless Slime Molds Navigate Mazes and Make DecisionsPublished: September 22, 2020Tanya Latty: I had never even heard of slime mold before I took this job.So, here you have this organism that has no brain, no organs, no neurons of any kind, yet it’s able to do some of the behaviors we normally associate with animals with brains.Toshiyuki Nakagaki: It is mysterious. Astounding. Solving a maze is amazing. How can a single-celled organism have such a capacity?Latty: I mean, when you think about it, 99 percent of the living things on our planet are brainless, but they need to find food; they need to find partners to reproduce often; they may need to hide from predator. How do you do all of that when you don’t have a brain?When I came back to Australia, I thought it would be awesome to have one of these as a lab pet. It lived in my desk for a few weeks. I started to notice that it was doing things a lot like my ants were doing.Narrator: So, she introduced Physarum to one of her colleagues, Audrey Dussutour.Audrey Dussutour: I was a post-doc, in Australia, studying nutrition in ants.It looked like an old omelet. The next day, it had escaped from the box we put him in. It reminded us of this alien organism from a ’50s movie that ate people, and grew and grew as it ate.Latty: It’s unstoppable, it just, kind of, keeps coming.Movie Announcer: The world could fall, before the bloodcurdling threat of The Blob.Dussutour: Physarum doesn’t eat people, it eats oatmeal. But it’s really a glutton. It doubles in size every day. I nicknamed it “Blob.”Narrator: Physarum began consuming their time and attention, and soon Tanya and Audrey shifted the focus of their research to this remarkable creature.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

NOVA investigates the story of cannabis from the criminalization that has disproportionately harmed communities of color to the latest medical understanding of the plant. What risks does cannabis pose to the developing brain? How much do we know about its potential medical benefits? As cannabis becomes socially accepted, scientists are exploring its long-term health consequences. (Premiered September 29, 2021)Check out a previously recorded panel discussion and audience Q&amp;A featuring experts and producers from "The Cannabis Question" <a href="https://youtu.be/nSTT5RZ_hxA">here</a>.

As state-legalized cannabis spreads, NOVA explores its little-known risks and benefits.

The Cannabis Question

A 2006 composite image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Telescope shows the chaos of baby stars in the Orion nebula some 1,500 light-years away. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

With the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble era is gradually drawing to a close. Here are some highlights from the countless wonders Hubble has shown us during its 31 years in space.

10 spectacular Hubble Space Telescope images

A statue of Zheng He at the Sam Poo Kong Temple in Java, Indonesia. Image Credit: Budianto Santosa, Shutterstock

In the 1400s, Zheng He sailed thousands of miles around Asia and Africa in ships the size of soccer fields, spreading Chinese innovations like compasses and gunpowder in the process.

Brainless Slime Molds Navigate Mazes and Make Decisions

Support Provided By

Explore More

Slime Mold Smarts

Clothing from Slime?

Secret Mind of Slime

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

Slime Mold Smarts

Clothing from Slime?

Secret Mind of Slime