The French government has issued an official warning about Slime. The warning comes from ANSES [Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail]. It bears the headline “Le Slime, une pâte très prisée mais pas sans risque.” Here’s a machine-translation of the first paragraph: “ANSES and the DGCCRF alert consumers to […]
Tag: slime
Slime moulds and French motorway planning (new study)
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, were jointly awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Transportation Planning prize for using slime mould to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks. See: ‘Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design’ in […]
Music of the Slime Moulds
“Physarum polycephalum, hereafter referred to as Physarum goo, inhabits cool, moist, shaded areas over decaying plant matter, and it eats nutrients such as oat flakes, bacteria and dead organic matter. It is a biological computing substrate, which has been enjoying much popularity within the Unconventional Computing research community for its astonishing computational properties.” [For a […]
Fudge on hagfish slime
Kathryn Knight writes in the Journal of Experimental Biology: Hagfish [pictured here, in a NOAA photo] don’t score high on the fish charisma scale. They are very unattractive, have a reputation for devouring victims from the inside out and, if attacked, they instantly release litres of repulsive slime. However, despite their repelling habits, Douglas Fudge […]
