September 20, 2025 • 49 mins
If you’ve ever wandered past what looked like a pile of dog barf on a log during a hike in the woods, you’d just seen slime mold - one of the most perplexing organisms on Earth. Listen to this classic episode and get as amazed as Josh and Chuck were when they recorded it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey there, everybody, it's Josh and for this week's select,
I've chosen our June of twenty twenty one episode on
slime Mold. It's actually a powerhouse episode and it's filled
with maybe more amazing facts than any other episode we've
ever recorded. It's just like mind blow after mind blow
after mind blow. So strap on your old timey football
(00:23):
helmet and prepare for slime Mold. I really think you're
going to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant, and this is Stuff you
should Know. No producer edition, that's right, it's just us, buddy,
We're going to do it. We're going to be just fine.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Jerry took an early vacation for Memorial Day.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I know she's always doing stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
She knows how to live, and we're stuck with slime
Mold in her absence.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I like slime Mold.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I knew you would love slime Mold.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's very Josh Clarky.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
It is kind of Josh Clarky so much so that
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, Yeah, like all the different kinds of it.
I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight
(01:41):
year old I never was.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, and then you're like, let me clark this over
to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes, yeah, I
like slimold too. I think it's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Let's do it, Okay, Chuck, I'm ready. All right, everybody
stand back because we are doing it.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, I was gonna say 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 guess.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I mean, like literally in the last minute they were like,
I still don't know if this is an animal? Is
it a dog in disguise?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
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 mail.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So what is it though, besides super ancient as in
like maybe one of the very first living things.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Well, it's a protest, actually, they figured out, and protest
seems to be well, it's one of the five main
Kingdom's animal bacteria, plants, fungi, and then protests and protusts
are typically single celled organisms like a meba, yeah, or
protozoans things like that, and they have I couldn't find
(03:03):
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 fung guy over to the
Kingdom protista.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, which is interesting because for years they had been
studied by mycologists who were fun, fun guys. Yeah, And
they found out later they were like you know what, sorry,
they should really go over to the protostologists and they said,
we kind of like these guys, Can we keep studying
them since we have been? And they said sure, And
(03:36):
the protostologists were superbist.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
They were, they were. They're still actually not over it.
They're frequently tpeeing the academic halls of the mycologists whenever
they get the chance.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Yeah, it's just very bitter battle.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
So that is pretty cute that that the fung guy
people are still are still studying slime molds even though
they're not fung guy. But there's you know, some good
reas is why they were originally considered to be fungi,
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
(04:13):
of them form kind of netlike honeycomb structures. Some of
them look like dog barf. One of the main ones
we'll talk about today looks a lot like dog barf.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
They look like a fungus though, Like if you were
walking in the woods and you saw this, nine out
of ten people would say, well, it's got to be
some kind of fungus.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
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 fungi, and that they move. They just move
so slowly it's not apparent to the naked eye. But
if you film these things with time lapse cameras and
(04:51):
speed it up, you can see all they very clearly
move about from place to place. So that's a big
differentiator between them and fungi. But one of the reasons
they thought they were like funger, that they were funger
is because they produce spores to reproduce.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Right, And I mentioned their ancient origins. 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,
(05:30):
slime molds in Gulf. I think it's it's not called photography,
it's called figotrophy.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Oh yeah, it's not how I was going to say it.
But are you going to say fego travo trophy? Yeah,
but I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, you know us, it wouldn't be ues if we
didn't probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when
you basically surround something and engulf it and just sort
of like move it into your body just like sort
of absorb it basically.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, which is another difference between slime molds and fungi,
because fungi 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 crawl onto or grow on dead people,
dead trees, all that stuff break them back down into
(06:21):
their constituents. So the fact that this slime mold feeds
on other things, it makes it a really important part
of the food web sure, as part of the nutrient cycle,
because other things come along and eat the slime molds.
There's apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized
jaw that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I
(06:42):
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 molds.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Right, And even though other protists can carry disease, slime
mold is quite human friendly. Actually, you can eat the
stuff if you want. There's a dish in Mexico, in
some parts of Mexico called Coca de Luna, which is
exactly what you think it is. Yeah, poop of the moon,
moon poop, yep, and they eat the stuff. I even
(07:19):
looked online to try and get a good recipe, but
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.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It seems like almost almost smacks of urban legend. But
I'm seeing it in different enough forms yeah 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.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
True, and we pointed out they weren't animals or plants,
but we definitely need to point out that slime mold
is also not mold. No as a protest.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
That's right. So one of the really amazing things about
slime mold is there's a couple of different kinds, as
we'll talk about in a second, but 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
(08:18):
pizza large pizza, I guess, depending on whether you're getting
ripped off by your pizza guy. But like twelve inches
in diameter. Yeah, that's enormous. Right, So you're like, well,
that's pretty cool. It's a big blob of mold. Well,
put your sockgarters on, because I'm about to 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.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
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 different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all
that stuff, but it's just not it doesn't have cell walls.
(09:01):
It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and
lives inside this giant fortress wall.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah. It's almost like if you took all the cells
that should have made this giant blob up as a
multi cellular organism and just kind of broke them open
and dumped all the contents into this blob. Yeah, and
then through the cell walls away, that's what you would have.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It's super interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
It is, and it's it's really kind of straightforward if
you just hear it. But it's also really easy to
just keep going like wait, why why is it like that?
And how is it like this? What's going on here?
Which is one of those things that it just it
makes slime mold. It's its own thing. And we're still
learning about this stuff, you know, every day.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah, and I mean it gets there's quite a few
times in here where we're going to say, and here's
where it gets even crazier.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This isn't super crazy. But the other kind of slime mold,
or the other big broad categories, the cellular slime mold,
and these are lots of individ vidual, 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
(10:14):
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 merry way and
split up.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Again, yeah, which is pretty nuts. They also will come
together 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. Yeah,
so it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that.
It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the
(10:52):
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
(11:13):
just kind of loosely formed together. And a really good
way of understanding what the cellular slime molds create is
kind of like a swarm.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I think.
Or what's the uh god, that my favorite thing? When
the birds do that? What's that called?
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Flock of seagulls? Haircut?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Sure, that's it, 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
(11:52):
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 these actually kind of serve as
important little markers.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As a matter of fact. Write it down, everybody. We'll
wait until you get a pen and a piece of paper.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Bullover, go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah,
put on your mask by a pin. Yep, buy a
piece of paper.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for
that pen. Really, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Pin markup is big at CBS.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
I think the general mark up at CVS is fairly high.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Oh, they're like, we get him in here for the aspirin,
then we really juice them with this ballpoint pen.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
That's right. I hope there's no CVS ads in this episode,
but we'll find out.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
What is a what's a good deal at a drug store?
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Is there like a there's zero?
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Are they all mark it up?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah? Everything's marked up because it's like it's like convenience
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
You sound like a lot of sound like a grandfather.
It's all marked up.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Right Back in my day, you just go to a
regular grocery store and buy your pens.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Well, you buy from the pin factory, straight from the
man who made it. It's right, you know, when I
was little, you would 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 nice and we would pull up
and I would get to walk inside this huge walk
(13:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Sure didn't. They back the cow up and it makes
a beeping sound and they just scort the milk right
into the back of your station.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Way. It's right, they mark it up first, wash your
way home. 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,
(13:49):
they can be black, blue, or green, but usually it's
sort of yellowish an orange. And you see that in
the forest, you're probably looking at a slime mold.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, especially if it's really hot out and it just rained.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, the worst thing in the world for me.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
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 they aren't
gonna do any harm. It'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 turned to kind of a gray or tam
(14:27):
powder and blow away. And that means that it just
turned into spores and it just reproduced all over your place.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
What.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
So put those salt guarters back on, because when we
come back, we're really gonna start knocking them off with
some of these amazing facts.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay, chuck, we set them up, let's knock them back down.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So here's one cool fact is that slime molds basically
can do the equivalent and do the equivalent of throwing
themselves on the grenade. 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, hmmm, I'm
feeling empathy today for my fellow mold. Sure, and so
(15:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And my heart will go on played in the background
as they get further and further away, exactly. But 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.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
So what about tell everyone about the dick Dystellium diyscoitus
discods discoids.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Okay, that's one of my favorite words now, discods.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Just because as disco in it.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So that this was this is a kind of cellular
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 going to turn into a bundle
(16:57):
of cellulose fibers, and that cellulose is going to connect
with other slime mold cells that have dyed and turned
into cellulose and come together and form a stalk, and
then at the top of the stalk a bunch of
different slime mold cells. They're called slugs. When they're individual
like that will climb up the stalk and then they'll
(17:17):
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 the stalk to let
the spores grow on top of which is pretty amazing itself.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
It is. 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 in the woods so they can eat it. They
got to go where the food is, and they either
move by these little appendages that like little feet like appendages.
Those are the cellular slime molds, the individual single celled
(17:57):
organisms that can come together, and this is crazy. 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.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
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. Like 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, Yeah, I don't like that smell. Wonder
we love them, but I like that smell. I'm going
(18:36):
to go toward that. So they make these amazing kind
of they look almost like seafans, you know what I'm
talking about. 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 fine food, they start moving toward it. It's
the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way
(18:59):
and next you know, over a very long period of time.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
See you know, five days later.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The slime mold has moved and actually sli molds. If
you don't they like they they're totally fine living in
petrie dishes for as long as you want them to,
as long as you feed them. If you stop feeding them,
they'll just get out of the petrie dish and start
looking for food elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So they'll they'll stay creepy.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's something like right out of Gremlins kind of you.
And I think you said they move it 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 it'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.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah, And I saw that a couple of places. Most
people cite something like a millimeter an hour. 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.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Sure, or you know, if you're just really patient and
you can lock in on something, you might be able
to see that.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
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, is showing some sort of intelligence.
They figure this out from you know, from watching these
things actually move about and when you when you film
them in like high speed and then replay it. You
(20:34):
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 food. They clearly can sense food somehow or
some way, and they spread out and they seem to
spread out and again in a really deliberate way. And
so some some researchers started to test slime molds to
(20:58):
see what they were capable of. One of the first one,
one of the first researchers was a Japanese scientist named
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, and I think so too. And doctor Nakagaki,
which is even better. Yeah, Yeah, built a maze, like
a pretty simple maze, but an actual three dimensional maze,
and a good sized peatree dish put what has come
(21:23):
to be known as probably the smartest size slime mold,
Phizarium polycephalum, which is kind of like the rock star
of the slime mold world these days, put a phaisarium
in it and said go to town, go find your
little favorite oat flake treat, which is their their favorite food. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
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 the micro organisms that grow on the oat flakes
is what they're after. It's not like they love oatmeal
or anything like that, right, right, And so he put
(22:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
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's definitely noworthy. You can write multiple papers on that
kind of study. And so another Japanese researcher came along
and said, hold mysake, a researcher named at Sushi Taro
(22:35):
from Hokkaido University, did you like that?
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
And doctor 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 mold does with that. Put a little slime
mold in a petri dish with these oat flakes that
kind of mimic the neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched it
go think over the course of like four or five days.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
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
(23:22):
commuter system, the subway system, and they laid it over
this grid of this slime and it was almost a
perfect match.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Is that nuts?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
That's I mean I had to reread that like five
times to even believe that that's what happened. That this
slime basically figured out the most efficient route to get
around essentially Tokyo.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Basically, and they're like, nah, Tokyo is probably one of
the most dense, right, Okay.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
I saw another another similar kind of a bit of
research chuck where they actually used oat flakes to signify
ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. Wow, this is this
is crazy. It's like an archaeological study. And they put
some they sicked some faisarium on it and paiserum on it,
(24:32):
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 mimicked these these
Roman roads like things that people had been like, okay,
this is the best route from this city to this city.
That the sli mold did basically the same thing and
(24:54):
apparently revealed some lost stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it could. Also it's interesting
like if it does 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 mold is spoken.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
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
right ends up winning.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know, well, I wonder if you I mean, and
we'll get to 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 it didn't match. They're like, we totally should
have gone this way.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yes, I feel like that that is the direction that
people are kind of going in that they they could
conceivably use this for planning new stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You know, wow, so every city planner will have a
slime mold researcher at their best.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
What do you think, I'm quite frankly we want to
eat some oat flakes right about now.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I'm kind of in the mood for that too. We'll
be right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes?
(26:37):
I did not.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
We'll get you some, because here's the secret, everybody, when
we take a break, we don't really go take a break.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
We should have had some crusty old oat flakes on
your desk and just eating them real quick. I don't know,
I can't see.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
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. It's not like they're jellyfish
and they have some sort of weird neural net, right.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They got nothing like that at all, nothing like. They
have no way of generating consciousness in any form that
we recognize. And yet slime mold is teaching us to
open and open our horizons in hearts, to sure to
new ideas of what constitutes consciousness and intelligence, you know
(27:25):
what I'm saying. Yeah, it makes sense as a swarm,
as a bunch of cellular 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 single cell
plasmodial slime mold. That's one big giant cell and the
(27:47):
fact that it behaves in ways that seem conscious to
some degree.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah. So if you want to kind of go back
in time to where a lot of this research research started,
it wasn't actually in but it was. In the nineteen sixties,
a physicist named Evelyn Fox Keller was curious if she
could use math to model biological systems because they had
(28:12):
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 got to meet Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel is got
a little surprised for you. And Lee Siegel got together
and said, oh, doctor Keller, you need to meet our
friend slime mold. And doctor Keller was like, this is
(28:35):
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, which
is dictio dictyo stell stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictyo stellium, discudium.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
I think that's discoides discoidium.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, okay, but it's.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
The one we were talking about earlier that creates the stems.
They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the spores, right.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
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,
(29:28):
maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe
there's like a leader or a pacemaker sell 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.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, And they knew in particular that there was a
chemical called cyclical amp which is related to ATP the
dinocne triphosphate, and that that was how they were signaling.
But they thought 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.
(30:06):
That there weren't leaders, there weren't pacemakers who were in
charge of like you know, signaling and in effect making
decisions for the group. That it was actually like a
group effort, and that the the whatever whatever cell or
slug that they're called in this cellular slime mold swarm
was closest to food, it would signal with AMP that hey,
(30:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
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
a top down principle. In mind, humans often organized with
a 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
(31:03):
they went that way. And they never they never really
thought about the fact that it could be like, no,
it's a total bottom up system and whatever is closest
can figure out send out these signals.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah. So instead of like a hierarchy, it's more like
like it's like how a flock of birds operate. So
a flock of seagulls haircut operates where.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It runs so far away.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, but it's the hair that's closest to whatever it's
running from is the first to run and everybody else follows.
It's 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 basically following it. The bottom up,
bottom up decision making kind of thing. And so we
(31:47):
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.
But in the twenty first century, that whole idea of
autom up decision making or decentralized decision making has become
a real component in artificial intelligence design, because if you've
(32:11):
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 finally got something.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
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. Nice like a
lot of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Yeah, am
(32:53):
I base there? Or could that potentially be a thing?
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Not at all. I think it totally could be a thing.
It's anytime you have a huge amount of things that
you're trying to all get to do roughly the same
thing that they need to not you know, redouble their
efforts or replicate their efforts. So you don't want one
cleaning one part of the window and the other one
coming over and cleaning the same part of the window
(33:17):
that's already clean. 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 conceivably be
used for just about any situation, you've got the key
(33:38):
to the universe in your hand, Like there's actually I
read We'll have to do an episode on it one day.
But I read an article but 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 goes down to two.
There's two bits. You could say it's black and white,
(33:59):
one 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
(34:19):
with one another in increasingly sophisticated patterns. Wow, 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.
(34:42):
It's almost a paradox.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, this is like doctor Octagon stuff. Doctor Octagon.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I don't know, is that right from Spot? I don't
Yeah he was Alchequalina.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
You mean yeah, sure, all right.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
I like al from Alina. I think he makes some
really weird choices for parts.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
He's great.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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
z eyite Geist a few times. Oh yeah, and like
they booked him on some other comedy shows. I'm like, guys,
throw a little Molina my way for.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Real, Molina spread all over. Movie Crush.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
You've been on Daily's Eyed Guys twice. I've never half.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I've been on a movie Crush once too.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
I had Miles on the Movie Crush the other day
and I was given my heart time because they haven't
asked me on and they think twice.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
It's a hilarious keep it up, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah, he was like, uh no, man, I was like,
Miles's cool.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Did he really flustered him?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I feel like he was on skates for a second there,
but I let him off the hook. I'm having Jack
on next week, so I'm really like going full court
press here.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, Miles is like man beat beyond guard. Chuck does
not punches.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It's funny because Miles, you know, as you know, is
such a smart smart guy and just like having a
conversation with him is always amazing. And then he comes
on and he picks Maul Rats. What's his favorite movie?
Was it? Really?
Speaker 1 (36:15):
That's his favorite movie of all time?
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Huh? I mean that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man,
I never said I had good tastes, so nice. It
was pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Do you have any hints of what Jacks is going
to be?
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Well, I know it's pulp fiction because he he had
me save it like two years ago, and I just
you know, we kept slipping through the crack. So he's
gonna come on next week for pulp fiction. Very nice,
all right, So let's get back to I mean, we
talked about how the the d D as we're going
to call it, moves around without yeah, without the pacemaker sells.
(36:45):
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 oscillate at different frequencies.
(37:06):
Depending what's going on, like where they are and then
what their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so
when they go close to food, they start oscillating, shaking
like 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
(37:26):
cytoplasm going in that food direction.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, and so the slime mold effectively moves to the
food because of 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.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Or like you said, away from something that they don't like.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, yes, which is pretty neat. So those are the
two things. It's moving toward food and moving away from something.
And one of the things that they found is that
slime mold can actually learn and not only learn to
like stay away from something, it can actually teach other
slime mold to stay away from it, even slime mold
(38:07):
it's never been introduced to it, or alternately, it can
teach this is the really the salt garter fact. It
can teach other slime mold that something that seems harmful
is actually harmless?
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, this is a pretty cool experiment. Yeah, so these
researchers put slime molds. They built it a little tiny bridge.
It was very cute, and they coated this bridge in
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 those little oat flakes on the other
(38:43):
side as their ultimate temptation. And so these first slime
molds start creeping up to it and sort of dipping
their little toe in the water and saying, this stuff
is pretty noxious. But then they learned, right like, oh okay,
so it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.
And what they found was that it learned to cross
(39:05):
this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that
were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right, So it said, okay, this stuff's fine. It's gross,
is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me.
So I'm going to get to food just as fast.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
That's pretty amazing in and of self. But where it
gets crazy, yes, right, they we need like a banner
matter nole to come in.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
And say that, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
So 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
(39:50):
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's 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
(40:11):
they figured out, chuck, that it doesn't matter if you
take three habituated slime molds and fuse 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 in
either situation.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
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 habituated I'm gonna
call them in the no molds, okay, And it forgot.
It forgot that the coding was harmless, and it sort
of had to approach it with a little more trepidation.
(40:50):
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 that works. And I think they even figured
out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave
behind acts as sort of like a spatial memory, because
(41:12):
they come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's
already been here before.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Me, right, so there's no reason to go research this
area because there 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,
(41:37):
we have no idea, but we're going to go find
out and maybe in ten years we'll be able to
explain it right.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
So eventually, you know, the people that are people that
are hip to the slime mold thing are like.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Trying to spread though.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
They're trying to spread the word to me, like this
stuff is really amazing. They're doing TED talks on 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
(42:14):
of a reverse engineered it and we could see what
that looked like and how we could use it.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So yeah, this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured
out or took I don't know exactly who figured out
exactly what the slime mold's 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
(42:42):
things it's like algorithms, and found that these fractals started
forming that looked essentially just like slime mold moving across
a peatri edish in search of food, which is pretty
cool in and of itself. It was an art art
project basically, but someone on a tea of astrophysicists heard
about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when they
(43:04):
were stumped trying to figure out how to map the
invisible matter that makes up basically the structure of our universe.
That if we can just crack that nut, we'll understand
the universe exponentially better than we do now, but we
cannot figure out how to do it. And so, just
(43:25):
like with the ancient roads between the Roman cities or
the Tokyo subway map, someone figured out to use slime
mold to basically try to try to create the structure
of the universe. This invisible these invisible filaments.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, these filaments that came out of the Big Bang.
So I guess they went back to Sage Jensen and said,
first of all, Sage U c plus plus code. Isn't
it really just be minus code? And we're being honest,
And he said, that's not how it works. Get out
of the mouth.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
That's great coding joke.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Thank you. It's my own coding joke, and I just.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Made it the only coding joke I think.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
No, I think it's not a bug. It's a feature,
isn't that one? Oh that's true, true to old timy.
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,
(44:25):
they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells,
and they put it on a map with thirty seven
thousand real galaxies 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
(44:46):
mold 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.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yeah, So when the slime mold was finished, they all
stood background that that's amazing. How accurate is it? And
they all just realize that they had no idea how
to verify 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 mold did
(45:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
You know, what if slime mold is God?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
What if we're your sleep right now and this is
all just one dream, chuck.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
The other cool thing they figured out with the slime
mold moving around is when they were researching them, they
found that they those mazes that they were running 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
(46:04):
the pace and make make these decisions quicker and get
to that food.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
And stop fussing around. I don't like this light staring
at me.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
I think we kind of blew some minds today.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I think so, my mind's definitely been blown.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Did you want to cover the Amazon thing?
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Nope? Okay, good, that's it for slimld unless you got
anything else, right now? Do you?
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
We'll have to revisit us in ten years. And thanks
to Dave rus for helping us with this one. And
since I said Dave Ruse, I think Chuck, it means
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Hey guys, I'm gonna call this night Trap response.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
I just laugh every time I hear those words together.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
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 fifth 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's the same style and video camera control quality, and
it starred Corey Ham. Perhaps arguably a little better game,
(47:07):
but still had the same thing going on. Really, I'm
sure your research finds lots of things that don't quite
make it into the final show. Aaron, we did not
know about Double Switch, so nice work there. Yeah, and
Aaron says, I've listened to so many shows I feel
that Chuck and I are some sort of long lost
brothers separated at birth. I 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
(47:28):
another tour started and make it back to Michigan. Keep
up the good work of 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 and Michigan.
And we're definitely gonna start touring again. I would say
probably next year, although we haven't really talked much about.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
It, no, but we need to. It's definitely starting to
get to be time to get talking, I guess, although
I admit I have not missed the traveling. I've missed
being on stage, but not the traveling.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Well, you know that's what they say. That's what rockstars say.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
It's not the heat, it's the humidity.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Now they say that, you know, you get paid to travel,
you don't get paid to play shows.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
That's where we go. Yes, 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 Haym
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 iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey there, everybody, it's Josh and for this week's select,
I've chosen our June of twenty twenty one episode on
slime Mold. It's actually a powerhouse episode and it's filled
with maybe more amazing facts than any other episode we've
ever recorded. It's just like mind blow after mind blow
after mind blow. So strap on your old timey football
(00:23):
helmet and prepare for slime Mold. I really think you're
going to enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant, and this is Stuff you
should Know. No producer edition, that's right, it's just us, buddy,
We're going to do it. We're going to be just fine.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Jerry took an early vacation for Memorial Day.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I know she's always doing stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
She knows how to live, and we're stuck with slime
Mold in her absence.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I like slime Mold.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I knew you would love slime Mold.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
It's very Josh Clarky.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
It is kind of Josh Clarky so much so that
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, Yeah, like all the different kinds of it.
I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight
(01:41):
year old I never was.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, and then you're like, let me clark this over
to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes, yeah, I
like slimold too. I think it's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Let's do it, Okay, Chuck, I'm ready. All right, everybody
stand back because we are doing it.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, I was gonna say 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 guess.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I mean, like literally in the last minute they were like,
I still don't know if this is an animal? Is
it a dog in disguise?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
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 mail.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So what is it though, besides super ancient as in
like maybe one of the very first living things.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Well, it's a protest, actually, they figured out, and protest
seems to be well, it's one of the five main
Kingdom's animal bacteria, plants, fungi, and then protests and protusts
are typically single celled organisms like a meba, yeah, or
protozoans things like that, and they have I couldn't find
(03:03):
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 fung guy over to the
Kingdom protista.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, which is interesting because for years they had been
studied by mycologists who were fun, fun guys. Yeah, And
they found out later they were like you know what, sorry,
they should really go over to the protostologists and they said,
we kind of like these guys, Can we keep studying
them since we have been? And they said sure, And
(03:36):
the protostologists were superbist.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
They were, they were. They're still actually not over it.
They're frequently tpeeing the academic halls of the mycologists whenever
they get the chance.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Yeah, it's just very bitter battle.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
So that is pretty cute that that the fung guy
people are still are still studying slime molds even though
they're not fung guy. But there's you know, some good
reas is why they were originally considered to be fungi,
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
(04:13):
of them form kind of netlike honeycomb structures. Some of
them look like dog barf. One of the main ones
we'll talk about today looks a lot like dog barf.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
They look like a fungus though, Like if you were
walking in the woods and you saw this, nine out
of ten people would say, well, it's got to be
some kind of fungus.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
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 fungi, and that they move. They just move
so slowly it's not apparent to the naked eye. But
if you film these things with time lapse cameras and
(04:51):
speed it up, you can see all they very clearly
move about from place to place. So that's a big
differentiator between them and fungi. But one of the reasons
they thought they were like funger, that they were funger
is because they produce spores to reproduce.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Right, And I mentioned their ancient origins. 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,
(05:30):
slime molds in Gulf. I think it's it's not called photography,
it's called figotrophy.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Oh yeah, it's not how I was going to say it.
But are you going to say fego travo trophy? Yeah,
but I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, you know us, it wouldn't be ues if we
didn't probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when
you basically surround something and engulf it and just sort
of like move it into your body just like sort
of absorb it basically.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, which is another difference between slime molds and fungi,
because fungi 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 crawl onto or grow on dead people,
dead trees, all that stuff break them back down into
(06:21):
their constituents. So the fact that this slime mold feeds
on other things, it makes it a really important part
of the food web sure, as part of the nutrient cycle,
because other things come along and eat the slime molds.
There's apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized
jaw that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I
(06:42):
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 molds.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Right, And even though other protists can carry disease, slime
mold is quite human friendly. Actually, you can eat the
stuff if you want. There's a dish in Mexico, in
some parts of Mexico called Coca de Luna, which is
exactly what you think it is. Yeah, poop of the moon,
moon poop, yep, and they eat the stuff. I even
(07:19):
looked online to try and get a good recipe, but
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.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
It seems like almost almost smacks of urban legend. But
I'm seeing it in different enough forms yeah 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.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
True, and we pointed out they weren't animals or plants,
but we definitely need to point out that slime mold
is also not mold. No as a protest.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
That's right. So one of the really amazing things about
slime mold is there's a couple of different kinds, as
we'll talk about in a second, but 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
(08:18):
pizza large pizza, I guess, depending on whether you're getting
ripped off by your pizza guy. But like twelve inches
in diameter. Yeah, that's enormous. Right, So you're like, well,
that's pretty cool. It's a big blob of mold. Well,
put your sockgarters on, because I'm about to 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.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
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 different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all
that stuff, but it's just not it doesn't have cell walls.
(09:01):
It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and
lives inside this giant fortress wall.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah. It's almost like if you took all the cells
that should have made this giant blob up as a
multi cellular organism and just kind of broke them open
and dumped all the contents into this blob. Yeah, and
then through the cell walls away, that's what you would have.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It's super interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
It is, and it's it's really kind of straightforward if
you just hear it. But it's also really easy to
just keep going like wait, why why is it like that?
And how is it like this? What's going on here?
Which is one of those things that it just it
makes slime mold. It's its own thing. And we're still
learning about this stuff, you know, every day.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah, and I mean it gets there's quite a few
times in here where we're going to say, and here's
where it gets even crazier.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This isn't super crazy. But the other kind of slime mold,
or the other big broad categories, the cellular slime mold,
and these are lots of individ vidual, 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
(10:14):
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 merry way and
split up.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Again, yeah, which is pretty nuts. They also will come
together 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. Yeah,
so it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that.
It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the
(10:52):
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
(11:13):
just kind of loosely formed together. And a really good
way of understanding what the cellular slime molds create is
kind of like a swarm.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I think.
Or what's the uh god, that my favorite thing? When
the birds do that? What's that called?
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Flock of seagulls? Haircut?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Sure, that's it, 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
(11:52):
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 these actually kind of serve as
important little markers.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As a matter of fact. Write it down, everybody. We'll
wait until you get a pen and a piece of paper.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Bullover, go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah,
put on your mask by a pin. Yep, buy a
piece of paper.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for
that pen. Really, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Pin markup is big at CBS.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
I think the general mark up at CVS is fairly high.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Oh, they're like, we get him in here for the aspirin,
then we really juice them with this ballpoint pen.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
That's right. I hope there's no CVS ads in this episode,
but we'll find out.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
What is a what's a good deal at a drug store?
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Is there like a there's zero?
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Are they all mark it up?
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah? Everything's marked up because it's like it's like convenience
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
You sound like a lot of sound like a grandfather.
It's all marked up.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Right Back in my day, you just go to a
regular grocery store and buy your pens.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Well, you buy from the pin factory, straight from the
man who made it. It's right, you know, when I
was little, you would 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 nice and we would pull up
and I would get to walk inside this huge walk
(13:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Sure didn't. They back the cow up and it makes
a beeping sound and they just scort the milk right
into the back of your station.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Way. It's right, they mark it up first, wash your
way home. 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,
(13:49):
they can be black, blue, or green, but usually it's
sort of yellowish an orange. And you see that in
the forest, you're probably looking at a slime mold.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, especially if it's really hot out and it just rained.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Yeah, the worst thing in the world for me.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
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 they aren't
gonna do any harm. It'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 turned to kind of a gray or tam
(14:27):
powder and blow away. And that means that it just
turned into spores and it just reproduced all over your place.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
What.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
So put those salt guarters back on, because when we
come back, we're really gonna start knocking them off with
some of these amazing facts.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay, chuck, we set them up, let's knock them back down.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
So here's one cool fact is that slime molds basically
can do the equivalent and do the equivalent of throwing
themselves on the grenade. 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, hmmm, I'm
feeling empathy today for my fellow mold. Sure, and so
(15:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
And my heart will go on played in the background
as they get further and further away, exactly. But 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.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
So what about tell everyone about the dick Dystellium diyscoitus
discods discoids.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Okay, that's one of my favorite words now, discods.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Just because as disco in it.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So that this was this is a kind of cellular
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 going to turn into a bundle
(16:57):
of cellulose fibers, and that cellulose is going to connect
with other slime mold cells that have dyed and turned
into cellulose and come together and form a stalk, and
then at the top of the stalk a bunch of
different slime mold cells. They're called slugs. When they're individual
like that will climb up the stalk and then they'll
(17:17):
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 the stalk to let
the spores grow on top of which is pretty amazing itself.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
It is. 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 in the woods so they can eat it. They
got to go where the food is, and they either
move by these little appendages that like little feet like appendages.
Those are the cellular slime molds, the individual single celled
(17:57):
organisms that can come together, and this is crazy. 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.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
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. Like 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, Yeah, I don't like that smell. Wonder
we love them, but I like that smell. I'm going
(18:36):
to go toward that. So they make these amazing kind
of they look almost like seafans, you know what I'm
talking about. 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 fine food, they start moving toward it. It's
the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way
(18:59):
and next you know, over a very long period of time.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
See you know, five days later.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The slime mold has moved and actually sli molds. If
you don't they like they they're totally fine living in
petrie dishes for as long as you want them to,
as long as you feed them. If you stop feeding them,
they'll just get out of the petrie dish and start
looking for food elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
So they'll they'll stay creepy.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's something like right out of Gremlins kind of you.
And I think you said they move it 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 it'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.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah, And I saw that a couple of places. Most
people cite something like a millimeter an hour. 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.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Sure, or you know, if you're just really patient and
you can lock in on something, you might be able
to see that.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
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, is showing some sort of intelligence.
They figure this out from you know, from watching these
things actually move about and when you when you film
them in like high speed and then replay it. You
(20:34):
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 food. They clearly can sense food somehow or
some way, and they spread out and they seem to
spread out and again in a really deliberate way. And
so some some researchers started to test slime molds to
(20:58):
see what they were capable of. One of the first one,
one of the first researchers was a Japanese scientist named
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, and I think so too. And doctor Nakagaki,
which is even better. Yeah, Yeah, built a maze, like
a pretty simple maze, but an actual three dimensional maze,
and a good sized peatree dish put what has come
(21:23):
to be known as probably the smartest size slime mold,
Phizarium polycephalum, which is kind of like the rock star
of the slime mold world these days, put a phaisarium
in it and said go to town, go find your
little favorite oat flake treat, which is their their favorite food. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
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 the micro organisms that grow on the oat flakes
is what they're after. It's not like they love oatmeal
or anything like that, right, right, And so he put
(22:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
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's definitely noworthy. You can write multiple papers on that
kind of study. And so another Japanese researcher came along
and said, hold mysake, a researcher named at Sushi Taro
(22:35):
from Hokkaido University, did you like that?
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
And doctor 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 mold does with that. Put a little slime
mold in a petri dish with these oat flakes that
kind of mimic the neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched it
go think over the course of like four or five days.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
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
(23:22):
commuter system, the subway system, and they laid it over
this grid of this slime and it was almost a
perfect match.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Is that nuts?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
That's I mean I had to reread that like five
times to even believe that that's what happened. That this
slime basically figured out the most efficient route to get
around essentially Tokyo.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Basically, and they're like, nah, Tokyo is probably one of
the most dense, right, Okay.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
I saw another another similar kind of a bit of
research chuck where they actually used oat flakes to signify
ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. Wow, this is this
is crazy. It's like an archaeological study. And they put
some they sicked some faisarium on it and paiserum on it,
(24:32):
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 mimicked these these
Roman roads like things that people had been like, okay,
this is the best route from this city to this city.
That the sli mold did basically the same thing and
(24:54):
apparently revealed some lost stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it could. Also it's interesting
like if it does 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 mold is spoken.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
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
right ends up winning.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know, well, I wonder if you I mean, and
we'll get to 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 it didn't match. They're like, we totally should
have gone this way.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yes, I feel like that that is the direction that
people are kind of going in that they they could
conceivably use this for planning new stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You know, wow, so every city planner will have a
slime mold researcher at their best.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
What do you think, I'm quite frankly we want to
eat some oat flakes right about now.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I'm kind of in the mood for that too. We'll
be right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes?
(26:37):
I did not.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
We'll get you some, because here's the secret, everybody, when
we take a break, we don't really go take a break.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
We should have had some crusty old oat flakes on
your desk and just eating them real quick. I don't know,
I can't see.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
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. It's not like they're jellyfish
and they have some sort of weird neural net, right.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They got nothing like that at all, nothing like. They
have no way of generating consciousness in any form that
we recognize. And yet slime mold is teaching us to
open and open our horizons in hearts, to sure to
new ideas of what constitutes consciousness and intelligence, you know
(27:25):
what I'm saying. Yeah, it makes sense as a swarm,
as a bunch of cellular 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 single cell
plasmodial slime mold. That's one big giant cell and the
(27:47):
fact that it behaves in ways that seem conscious to
some degree.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yeah. So if you want to kind of go back
in time to where a lot of this research research started,
it wasn't actually in but it was. In the nineteen sixties,
a physicist named Evelyn Fox Keller was curious if she
could use math to model biological systems because they had
(28:12):
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 got to meet Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel is got
a little surprised for you. And Lee Siegel got together
and said, oh, doctor Keller, you need to meet our
friend slime mold. And doctor Keller was like, this is
(28:35):
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, which
is dictio dictyo stell stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictyo stellium, discudium.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
I think that's discoides discoidium.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, okay, but it's.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
The one we were talking about earlier that creates the stems.
They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the spores, right.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
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,
(29:28):
maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe
there's like a leader or a pacemaker sell 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.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, And they knew in particular that there was a
chemical called cyclical amp which is related to ATP the
dinocne triphosphate, and that that was how they were signaling.
But they thought 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.
(30:06):
That there weren't leaders, there weren't pacemakers who were in
charge of like you know, signaling and in effect making
decisions for the group. That it was actually like a
group effort, and that the the whatever whatever cell or
slug that they're called in this cellular slime mold swarm
was closest to food, it would signal with AMP that hey,
(30:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
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
a top down principle. In mind, humans often organized with
a 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
(31:03):
they went that way. And they never they never really
thought about the fact that it could be like, no,
it's a total bottom up system and whatever is closest
can figure out send out these signals.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah. So instead of like a hierarchy, it's more like
like it's like how a flock of birds operate. So
a flock of seagulls haircut operates where.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It runs so far away.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, but it's the hair that's closest to whatever it's
running from is the first to run and everybody else follows.
It's 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 basically following it. The bottom up,
bottom up decision making kind of thing. And so we
(31:47):
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.
But in the twenty first century, that whole idea of
autom up decision making or decentralized decision making has become
a real component in artificial intelligence design, because if you've
(32:11):
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 finally got something.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
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. Nice like a
lot of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Yeah, am
(32:53):
I base there? Or could that potentially be a thing?
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Not at all. I think it totally could be a thing.
It's anytime you have a huge amount of things that
you're trying to all get to do roughly the same
thing that they need to not you know, redouble their
efforts or replicate their efforts. So you don't want one
cleaning one part of the window and the other one
coming over and cleaning the same part of the window
(33:17):
that's already clean. 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 conceivably be
used for just about any situation, you've got the key
(33:38):
to the universe in your hand, Like there's actually I
read We'll have to do an episode on it one day.
But I read an article but 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 goes down to two.
There's two bits. You could say it's black and white,
(33:59):
one 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
(34:19):
with one another in increasingly sophisticated patterns. Wow, 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.
(34:42):
It's almost a paradox.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Yeah, this is like doctor Octagon stuff. Doctor Octagon.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I don't know, is that right from Spot? I don't
Yeah he was Alchequalina.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
You mean yeah, sure, all right.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
I like al from Alina. I think he makes some
really weird choices for parts.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
He's great.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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
z eyite Geist a few times. Oh yeah, and like
they booked him on some other comedy shows. I'm like, guys,
throw a little Molina my way for.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Real, Molina spread all over. Movie Crush.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
You've been on Daily's Eyed Guys twice. I've never half.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I've been on a movie Crush once too.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
I had Miles on the Movie Crush the other day
and I was given my heart time because they haven't
asked me on and they think twice.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
It's a hilarious keep it up, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah, he was like, uh no, man, I was like,
Miles's cool.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Did he really flustered him?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I feel like he was on skates for a second there,
but I let him off the hook. I'm having Jack
on next week, so I'm really like going full court
press here.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, Miles is like man beat beyond guard. Chuck does
not punches.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It's funny because Miles, you know, as you know, is
such a smart smart guy and just like having a
conversation with him is always amazing. And then he comes
on and he picks Maul Rats. What's his favorite movie?
Was it? Really?
Speaker 1 (36:15):
That's his favorite movie of all time?
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Huh? I mean that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man,
I never said I had good tastes, so nice. It
was pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Do you have any hints of what Jacks is going
to be?
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Well, I know it's pulp fiction because he he had
me save it like two years ago, and I just
you know, we kept slipping through the crack. So he's
gonna come on next week for pulp fiction. Very nice,
all right, So let's get back to I mean, we
talked about how the the d D as we're going
to call it, moves around without yeah, without the pacemaker sells.
(36:45):
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 oscillate at different frequencies.
(37:06):
Depending what's going on, like where they are and then
what their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so
when they go close to food, they start oscillating, shaking
like 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
(37:26):
cytoplasm going in that food direction.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, and so the slime mold effectively moves to the
food because of 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.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Or like you said, away from something that they don't like.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, yes, which is pretty neat. So those are the
two things. It's moving toward food and moving away from something.
And one of the things that they found is that
slime mold can actually learn and not only learn to
like stay away from something, it can actually teach other
slime mold to stay away from it, even slime mold
(38:07):
it's never been introduced to it, or alternately, it can
teach this is the really the salt garter fact. It
can teach other slime mold that something that seems harmful
is actually harmless?
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, this is a pretty cool experiment. Yeah, so these
researchers put slime molds. They built it a little tiny bridge.
It was very cute, and they coated this bridge in
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 those little oat flakes on the other
(38:43):
side as their ultimate temptation. And so these first slime
molds start creeping up to it and sort of dipping
their little toe in the water and saying, this stuff
is pretty noxious. But then they learned, right like, oh okay,
so it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.
And what they found was that it learned to cross
(39:05):
this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that
were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Right, So it said, okay, this stuff's fine. It's gross,
is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me.
So I'm going to get to food just as fast.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
That's pretty amazing in and of self. But where it
gets crazy, yes, right, they we need like a banner
matter nole to come in.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
And say that, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
So 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
(39:50):
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's 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
(40:11):
they figured out, chuck, that it doesn't matter if you
take three habituated slime molds and fuse 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 in
either situation.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
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 habituated I'm gonna
call them in the no molds, okay, And it forgot.
It forgot that the coding was harmless, and it sort
of had to approach it with a little more trepidation.
(40:50):
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 that works. And I think they even figured
out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave
behind acts as sort of like a spatial memory, because
(41:12):
they come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's
already been here before.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Me, right, so there's no reason to go research this
area because there 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,
(41:37):
we have no idea, but we're going to go find
out and maybe in ten years we'll be able to
explain it right.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
So eventually, you know, the people that are people that
are hip to the slime mold thing are like.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
Trying to spread though.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
They're trying to spread the word to me, like this
stuff is really amazing. They're doing TED talks on 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
(42:14):
of a reverse engineered it and we could see what
that looked like and how we could use it.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
So yeah, this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured
out or took I don't know exactly who figured out
exactly what the slime mold's 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
(42:42):
things it's like algorithms, and found that these fractals started
forming that looked essentially just like slime mold moving across
a peatri edish in search of food, which is pretty
cool in and of itself. It was an art art
project basically, but someone on a tea of astrophysicists heard
about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when they
(43:04):
were stumped trying to figure out how to map the
invisible matter that makes up basically the structure of our universe.
That if we can just crack that nut, we'll understand
the universe exponentially better than we do now, but we
cannot figure out how to do it. And so, just
(43:25):
like with the ancient roads between the Roman cities or
the Tokyo subway map, someone figured out to use slime
mold to basically try to try to create the structure
of the universe. This invisible these invisible filaments.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, these filaments that came out of the Big Bang.
So I guess they went back to Sage Jensen and said,
first of all, Sage U c plus plus code. Isn't
it really just be minus code? And we're being honest,
And he said, that's not how it works. Get out
of the mouth.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
That's great coding joke.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Thank you. It's my own coding joke, and I just.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Made it the only coding joke I think.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
No, I think it's not a bug. It's a feature,
isn't that one? Oh that's true, true to old timy.
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,
(44:25):
they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells,
and they put it on a map with thirty seven
thousand real galaxies 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
(44:46):
mold 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.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yeah, So when the slime mold was finished, they all
stood background that that's amazing. How accurate is it? And
they all just realize that they had no idea how
to verify 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 mold did
(45:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
You know, what if slime mold is God?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
What if we're your sleep right now and this is
all just one dream, chuck.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
The other cool thing they figured out with the slime
mold moving around is when they were researching them, they
found that they those mazes that they were running 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
(46:04):
the pace and make make these decisions quicker and get
to that food.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
And stop fussing around. I don't like this light staring
at me.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
I think we kind of blew some minds today.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
I think so, my mind's definitely been blown.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Did you want to cover the Amazon thing?
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Nope? Okay, good, that's it for slimld unless you got
anything else, right now? Do you?
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
We'll have to revisit us in ten years. And thanks
to Dave rus for helping us with this one. And
since I said Dave Ruse, I think Chuck, it means
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Hey guys, I'm gonna call this night Trap response.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
I just laugh every time I hear those words together.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
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 fifth 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's the same style and video camera control quality, and
it starred Corey Ham. Perhaps arguably a little better game,
(47:07):
but still had the same thing going on. Really, I'm
sure your research finds lots of things that don't quite
make it into the final show. Aaron, we did not
know about Double Switch, so nice work there. Yeah, and
Aaron says, I've listened to so many shows I feel
that Chuck and I are some sort of long lost
brothers separated at birth. I 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
(47:28):
another tour started and make it back to Michigan. Keep
up the good work of 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 and Michigan.
And we're definitely gonna start touring again. I would say
probably next year, although we haven't really talked much about.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
It, no, but we need to. It's definitely starting to
get to be time to get talking, I guess, although
I admit I have not missed the traveling. I've missed
being on stage, but not the traveling.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Well, you know that's what they say. That's what rockstars say.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
It's not the heat, it's the humidity.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Now they say that, you know, you get paid to travel,
you don't get paid to play shows.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
That's where we go. Yes, 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 Haym
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 iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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