Selects: Slime Mold: 0% Mold, 100% Amazing

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Hey there, everybody.

It's Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our June of 2021 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 helmet and prepare for slime mold.

I really think you're going to enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

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.

Jerry took an early vacation for Memorial Day.

I know.

She's always doing stuff like that.

She knows how to live.

And we're stuck with slime mold in her absence.

I like slime mold.

I knew you would love slime mold.

Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff.

It's very Josh Clarky.

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 or there, but I didn't know much about it.

And then as I was researching it, 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-year-old I never was.

Yeah.

And then you were like, let me clark this over to Chuck and see what he thinks.

Yes.

Yeah.

I like slime mold too.

I think it's kind of cool.

Let's do it.

Okay, Chuck.

I'm ready.

All right, everybody, stand back because we are doing it.

Yeah, and I think you could file this.

I mean, it's not an animal, slime mold.

I guess we should just tell you right away, it's not an animal.

It's not a fungus, even though you would think it's a fungus if you saw it on the forest floor.

And we'll get to all this stuff.

But

it feels like an animal, one of our animal episodes anyway, sort of.

Yeah.

I was going to save the fact that it's not an animal or fungus or the very end, but sure, we could do it at the beginning, I guess.

You mean 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?

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.

So what is it, though, besides super ancient as in like maybe one of the very first living things?

Well, it's a protist, actually, they figured out.

And protist seems to be, well, it's one of the five main kingdoms, animal, bacteria, plants, fungi, and then protists.

And protists are typically single-celled organisms like amoeba

or protozoans, things like that.

And they have, I don't know, I couldn't find out exactly when they did it, but they fairly recently, I guess in the history of biology fairly recently, reclassified slime molds from the kingdom fungi over to the kingdom protista.

Yeah, which is interesting because for years they had been studied by mycologists who were fungis.

Yeah.

And

found out later, they were like, you know what?

Sorry.

This 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 the protostologists were super pissed.

They were.

They were.

They're still actually not over it.

They're frequently TPing the academic halls of the mycologists whenever they get the chance.

Yeah, it's this very bitter battle.

So that is pretty cute that the fungi people are still studying slime molds, even though they're not fungi.

But there's some good reasons 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 of them form kind of net-like 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.

They look like a fungus, though.

Like if you're 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.

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 in 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 speed it up, you can see, oh, 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 fungi, that they were fungi, is because they produce spores to reproduce.

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

eating the bacteria that breaks down other stuff that dies.

And that's what they feed on.

Bacteria, mold, yeast, basically anything that decomposes dead things.

Slime, molds, engulf.

I think it's not called photography.

It's called phagotrophy.

Oh, yeah.

It's a little bit.

That's not how I was going to say it, but you know.

What were you going to say?

Phagotrophy?

Phagotrophy, yeah, but I think you're absolutely right.

Well, you know us.

It wouldn't be us 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.

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, you break them back down into their constituents.

So the fact that the slime mold feeds on other things, it makes it a really important part of the food web.

Sure.

It's 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 think some kinds of insect larvae eat them.

And then so it just kind of keeps going.

But they're a really important part where you would just have these microbes that like the beetle couldn't get to, that they're able to basically get that energy from you know the bacteria by eating the slime mold right and even though other 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 and some parts of mexico called caca de luna which is exactly what you think it is yes poopa poopa the moon moon poop yep and uh they they eat this stuff i even looked online to try and get a good recipe but um

it's not on like the pages of martha stewart living like it's you got to dive deep into reddit and stuff like that to get some good recipes it seems like

almost almost smacks of urban legend but i'm seeing it in different enough forms 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 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 product.

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 pizza, large pizza, I guess, depending on whether you're getting ripped off by your pizza guy.

But about like 12 inches in diameter.

That's enormous, right?

So you're like, well, that's pretty cool.

It's a big blob of mold.

Well, put your sock garters 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.

Yeah, I mean, this is truly amazing.

The plasmodial slime mold, which is, I guess you could call it one of the true slime mold,

is it has all the stuff like as if it were undergoing cellular division and all the all the different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all that stuff.

But it's just not, it doesn't have cell walls.

It's not individual little cells.

It's just, it splits and lives inside this giant fortress wall.

Yeah, it's almost like if you took all the cells that should have made this giant blob up as a multicellular organism and just kind of broke them open and dumped all the contents into this blob, and then threw the cell walls away, that's what you would have.

It's super interesting.

It is.

And it's really kind of straightforward if you just hear it.

But it's also really easy to just keep going.

Like, wait a minute, 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 makes slime mold its own thing.

And we're still learning about this stuff

every day.

Yeah.

And

there's quite a few times in here where we're going to say, and here's where it gets even crazier.

That's right.

This isn't super crazy, but the other kind of slime mold,

or the other big broad category is the cellular slime mold.

And these are lots of individual single-celled organisms.

But the kind of knockout fact about them is when they're stressed out, if they don't have a lot of food around, they can

join up together and sort of look like one of those plasmodial slime molds, but it's not.

It's called, I guess, pseudoplasmodial.

Yeah.

Because it's not a real one, but it basically says, all right, we're going to 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 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 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 an actual true slime mold, is that they retain their cell walls, their individual cells, when they come together.

They just kind of loosely form together.

And a really good way of understanding what this cellular slime molds create is kind of like a swarm.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I think.

Or

what's the,

God, that's my favorite thing when the birds do that.

What's that called?

Flock of seagulls haircut.

Sure, that's it.

Boy, you threw me there.

So these, the plasmodium is covered by a layer of slime, and you're going to want to put a pin in this because when they do move around, they leave behind a little, these little collapsed tubules and it looks basically like not exactly like a snail trail, but sort of like a layer of slime.

And you're going to want to remember that for later on because these actually kind of serve as important little markers.

As a matter of fact, write it down, everybody.

We'll wait until you get a pen and a piece of paper.

Pull over.

Go inside the CBS closest to you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Put on your mask, buy a pen.

Yep.

Buy a piece of paper.

Pay 10, 12 times what you should have paid for that pen.

Really?

Oh, my God.

Pen markup is big at CVS?

I think the general markup at CVS is fairly high.

Oh, they're like, we get them in here for the aspirin, then we really juice them with those ballpoint pens.

That's right.

I hope there's no CVS ads in this episode, but we'll find out.

What is a good deal at a drugstore?

Is there like a...

There's none.

There's zero.

Are they all market up?

Yeah, everything's marked up because it's like a, it's a convenience kind of thing.

You sound like a lot of people.

You sound like a grandfather.

It's all marked up.

Back in my day, you just go to a regular grocery store and buy your pens.

from the pen factory, straight from the man who made it.

That's right.

You know, when I was little, we 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-in cooler, like next to a loading dock.

And I just thought it was like the coolest thing in the world somehow to get that fresh milk.

Sure.

Then

they back the cow up and it'd makes a beeping sound and they just squirt the milk right into the back of your station wagon.

That's right.

They mark it up first.

Slosh your way home.

So where were we?

Okay, if you do see this stuff in the woods, if you're ever hiking along and you see a big or medium-sized pizza, like yellow blob or orange blob, they can be red, they can be white, they can be maroon.

Very rarely they can be black, blue, or green.

But usually it's sort of yellow or sh and and orange.

And you see that in the forest, you're probably looking at a slime mold.

Yeah, especially if it's really hot out and it just rained.

Yeah,

the worst thing in the world for me.

You can also see them like on your grass, too.

Apparently, if it gets really rainy and hot, slime molds will actually come out of the woods into your grass and be like, oh, this is pretty nice.

And they aren't going to do any harm.

It's not a problem for your grass.

It just looks kind of gross.

It's certainly not going to hurt you or your pets.

And then eventually it'll dry up and turn to kind of a gray or tan powder and blow away.

And that means that it just turned into spores and it just reproduced all over your place.

Yeah, I think maybe we should take a break because right now people are probably like,

dudes, you promised greatness here.

And so far it's a little humdrum.

What?

So put those sock garters back on because when we come back, we're really going to start knocking them off with some of these amazing facts.

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Okay, Chuck, we set them up.

Let's knock them back down.

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, hmm, I'm feeling empathy today for my fellow mold.

Sure.

And so I'm going to save everybody because I've come across some infectious bacteria.

But what they do is they come across it, they engulf it, and then they say, let me go.

And they cut themselves off.

from the pack, from the swarm, and detach themselves and die of that infection, but save the rest of the group.

And

my heart will go on playing in the background as they get further and further away.

Exactly.

But that's altruism.

Yeah.

Which is pretty amazing considering, like you said, they don't have a brain or anything like that.

So

how are they doing this?

We'll get to that later.

So what about, tell everyone about the

dictystelium

discoitis?

Discoides.

Discoites, okay.

That's one of my favorite words now, discoites.

Just because it has disco in it.

So

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 of cellulose fibers.

And that cellulose is going to connect with other slime mold cells that have died and turned into cellulose and come together and form a stalk.

And then 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 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 in itself.

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, like little feet-like appendages.

Those are the cellular slime molds, the individual single-celled organisms that can come together.

Or, 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.

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.

Sounds like us.

It basically, yeah.

I don't like that smell.

No wonder we love them.

But I like that smell.

I'm going to go toward that.

So

they make these amazing kinds of, they look almost like C-fans.

You know what I'm talking about?

They look very fractally and they just kind of fan out, is the best way to put it, when they start to go look for food.

And when they do find food, they start moving toward it.

The cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way.

And next thing you know, over a very long period of time,

the slime mold has moved.

And actually, slime molds, if you don't,

they're totally fine living in petri 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 petri dish and start looking for food elsewhere.

So they'll

get creepy.

Yeah.

But I mean, again, it's not like you're just sitting there watching this thing crawl out of its petri dish.

It's you leave overnight and you forget to feed the thing, and you come back, and it's half of it is out onto the table or something like that.

It's something like right out of gremlins.

Kind of, yeah.

And I think you said they move at 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

I mean, it doesn't sound fast, but when you're talking about what we're talking about, it is pretty fast.

Yeah, and I saw that a couple of places.

Most people cite something like a millimeter an hour.

I can't remember which one goes that fast, but yeah, I mean, you can't see it moving when you're staring at it, but over time you can for sure.

Sure.

Or, you know, if you're just really patient and you can lock in on something,

you might be able to see that.

So when they started figuring out in the early 2000s, Japanese researchers were some of the first to like really study slime molds as showing some sort of intelligence.

They figured this out from, you know, from watching these things actually move about.

And when you film them

at like high speed and then replay it, you can see their movements are deliberate in a lot of ways.

They're not just blind, dumb movements where they happen onto 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 researchers started to test slime moles to see what they were capable of.

One of the first researchers

was a Japanese scientist named Toshiyuki Nakagaki.

Same name.

I think so, too.

And Dr.

Nakagaki, which is even better.

Yeah,

built a maze, like a pretty simple maze, but an actual three-dimensional maze in a good-sized pet tree dish and put

what has come to be known as probably the smartest

slime mold, Pfizerium polycephalum, which is kind of like the rock star of the slime mold world these days.

Put a Physarium in it and said, go to town, go find your little little favorite oat flake treat, which is their favorite food.

Yeah, and the key here 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 microorganisms 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 them there and studied them.

And over the course of hours, these things basically learned to get to that food in the quickest, fastest way, every single time.

Yeah.

Like it could, it could conceivably get to it, like you said, four different ways, but that fast way was the way that it would just, like, that's impressive.

That's definitely noteworthy.

You can write multiple papers on that kind of study.

And so another Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sake,

a researcher named Etsushi Taro from Hokkaido University.

Did you like that?

Yeah, it's good.

And Dr.

Tiro said, all right, what about this?

What if we take some oat flakes and basically make a general map of the neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime 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.

I think over the course of like four or five days, right?

Yeah,

and you might think, cool, it does what it does and it goes after that food in the most direct way possible, which is what it did.

But here's where it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they overlaid a map of the current Tokyo railway commuter system, the subway system.

Sure.

And they laid it over this grid of this slime and it was almost a perfect match.

Isn't that nuts?

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.

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, basically.

And they're like, nah, Tokyo is probably one of the most dense.

Right.

It's like, okay.

I saw another

similar kind of bit of research, Chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans.

Wow.

This is crazy.

This is like an archaeological study.

And they put some, they sticked some Pfizerium on it, and Pfizerum on it.

And

it mimicked ancient Roman roads that had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten, and ones that were well known in the Balkans.

It mimicked these Roman roads, like things that people had been like, okay, this is the best route from this city to this city.

The slime mold did basically the same thing and apparently revealed some lost stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it could also, it's interesting, like, if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment like this, does that mean

like the humans get it wrong?

Like, can they use this as a test and be like, sorry, the slime mold is spoken?

I guess so.

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 have

ends up winning.

Yeah.

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 and a couple of places it didn't match.

They're like, we totally should have gone this way.

Yes, I feel like that that is is the direction that people are kind of going in that they they could conceivably use this for planning new stuff you know wow so every city planner will have a slime mold researcher at their behest yeah i mean like this is crazy why not you know

all you have to do is have some oat flakes and a petri dish and you're good so i think we should take another break what do you think i'm quite frankly want to eat some oat flakes right about now i'm kind of in the mood for that too.

We'll be right back.

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most silfas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

It's washable, like fully washable.

Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard.

And here's the kicker.

It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Right now, you can even get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa.

Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head.

Check out washablesofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

That's washable sofas.com.

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Terms apply.

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How those ahead?

Stay ahead.

Okay, did you just eat some oat flakes?

I did not.

All right, well, we'll get you some.

Because here's the secret, everybody.

When we take a break, we don't really go take a break.

No, we should.

You could have had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and just eaten them real quick.

I don't know.

I can't see.

So, all right.

We've said that these things don't have brains.

They don't have, and I don't think we mentioned,

it's not like they have have a like a it's not like they're jellyfish and they have some sort of weird neural net right they got nothing like that at all

nothing like they have no way of of generating consciousness in any form that we recognize and yet slime mold is teaching us to open and open our horizons um and hearts to sure to new ideas of what constitutes consciousness and intelligence you know what i'm saying yeah like it makes sense as a swarm as a bunch of cellular a 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 fact that it behaves in ways that seem conscious to some degree.

Yeah, so if you want to kind of go back in time to where a lot of this

research started,

it wasn't actually actually in Japan, but it was in the 1960s.

A physicist named Evelyn Fox Keller

was curious if she could use math to model biological systems because they had had success using math to explain and expand our understanding of physics.

So she was like, let me see if we can do this with biology.

And someone said, well, you got to meet Lee Siegel.

Lee Siegel is, you got a little surprise for you.

And Lee Siegel got together and said, oh, Dr.

Keller, you need to meet our friend Slime Mold.

And Dr.

Keller was like, this is the 1960s.

I don't know what slime mold is yet.

And Keller and Siegel said, oh, well, just take a seat and let me tell you about this,

which is

dictyostelium, dictystelium, right?

Dictyostelium discoidium.

I think that's discoides.

Discoidium?

Yeah.

Okay.

But it's the one we were talking about earlier that creates the stems.

They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the spores.

Right.

And I think this was just significant because it was kind of like the first time anyone had observed and, you know, fell off of their lab stool and could explain it to others, these pseudoplasmodiums.

But what they were missing was they were like, all right, we see this happening and it's amazing.

And how are they doing this, though?

And the very first thing they thought of is, like, maybe it's like an ant colony or something.

And maybe there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell, or maybe a few of them, they get together and they just sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and say, go this way.

And the rest are just sort of the worker ants that follow along.

Yeah, and they knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical AMP,

which is related to ATP, the adenosine 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 they had that totally wrong, 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

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, there's some food over here.

Let's all go over this way.

And that signal would just kind of be passed along through the swarm, through the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move toward the food and start eating.

Yeah, and this was, you know, I mean,

you can see why they went in that initial direction because it made sense.

And a lot of nature is organized with a top-down principle in mind.

Humans often organize with a top-down principle, big business, government.

It's just a, it's a system that we're used to seeing in nature and in people.

And so it made sense that they went that way and

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 send out these signals.

Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy, it's more like

it's like how a flock of birds operates, a flock of seagulls haircut operates, where they run so far away?

Yeah, but it's the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from, is the first to run, and everybody else follows.

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.

It's a bottom-up decision-making kind of thing.

And so we started to learn a lot.

And we know a lot about bottom-up decision-making now, as opposed to when these guys were working back in the 60s, I think.

But in the 21st century, that whole idea idea of bottom-up decision-making or decentralized decision-making

has become a real component in

artificial intelligence design.

Because if you've listened to The End of the World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the hardest things in the world to do is program something to understand everything because you have to input all the stuff it needs to know.

Whereas if you can just kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to let the machine think for itself,

you finally got something.

Yeah, and I would imagine, I didn't see this anywhere, but it seems like this might could have some applications in nanotechnology as well, like the idea that we could program

billions of tiny little nano-bot bugs to clean the windows of your house every day.

Nice.

Like a lot of things collectively doing one bigger thing.

Yeah.

Am I off base there, or could that potentially be a thing?

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, but 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 that's already clean.

All you have to do is figure out how to teach them: 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 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 about a guy who was a, I think he was a physicist back in the 80s, who was like, I think the universe is basically an operating system that

goes down to two, there's two bits.

You could say it's black and white, one or zero, it doesn't matter.

But there are two kinds of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form, everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime mold.

Everything comes out of these two types of bits that basically make up the fabric of space and time interacting with one another in increasingly sophisticated patterns.

Wow.

And that is exactly what you're talking about.

So

if we can figure out what that computation is, what those algorithms are that give rise to larger and larger stuff,

you can do anything.

It's weird.

You can do increasingly sophisticated stuff the more basic your algorithm is.

It's almost a paradox.

Yeah.

This is like Dr.

Octagon stuff.

Dr.

Octagon?

I don't know.

Is that right?

From Spider-Man?

I don't.

Yeah, he was.

Alfred Molina, you mean?

Yeah.

Sure.

All right.

I like Alfred Molina.

I think he makes some really weird choices for parts.

Oh, he's great.

I'm sure if somebody's like, hey, we'll give you $10 million to play Dr.

Octagon, I'd be like, sure, you got it.

Where do I sign up?

Yeah, I need to get him on 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 Zeitgeist 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 real?

Yeah.

Molina spread all over Movie Crush.

You've been on Daily Zeitgeist twice.

I've never.

I've been on Movie Crush once, too.

I had Miles on the Movie Crush the other day, and I was giving him a hard time because they haven't asked me on, and they texted me on twice.

It's hilarious.

Keep it up, Chuck.

Keep it up.

He was like,

no, man.

I was like, Miles, it's cool.

Did he really?

You flustered him?

I feel like he was on skates for a second there.

That's hilarious.

I let him off the hook.

I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really like going full court press here.

Yeah, Miles is like, man, be on guard.

Chuck does not pull punches.

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 Mall Rats.

What's his favorite movie?

Was it really?

That's his favorite movie of all time, huh?

I mean, that's what he picked.

And he was like, hey, man, I never said I had good tastes.

So it was pretty fun.

Do you have any hints of what Jax is going to be?

Well, I know it.

It's pulp fiction because

he had me save it like two years ago.

And I just, you know we kept slipping through the cracks so he's gonna come on next week for pulp fiction very nice uh all right so let's get back to i mean we talked about how the uh the dd as we're gonna call it moves around without

yeah without a the pacemaker cells but that original true slime mole 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 uh 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 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 and shaking like, hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food.

And then that just sort of gets that flow.

Everyone else starts oscillating in a similar manner.

And that gets that flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction.

Yeah.

And so 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 and the slime mold moves toward it.

Or like you said, away from something that they don't like.

Yeah.

Yes,

which is pretty neat.

So those are the two things.

It's moving toward food or 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 that's never been introduced to it.

Or alternately, it can teach, this is the really the sock garter

fact, it can teach other slime mold that something that seems harmful is actually harmless.

Yeah, this is a pretty cool experiment.

Yeah.

So, these researchers put slime molds, they built 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 little those little oat flakes on the other 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.

Oh, 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 this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on right so it said okay this stuff's fine it tastes gross it's way too salty but it's not going to hurt me so i'm going to get to food just as fast right that's pretty amazing in and of itself but here's where it gets crazy yes right they um we need like a ben or matt or noel to come in and say that yeah totally um 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.

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 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 this and move across it just as fast as

in either situation.

Yeah, and then they also sort of figured out how long this took.

So the naive slime molds, they separated after an hour of fusion with those

habituated, I'm going to call them in the know molds.

Okay.

And it forgot.

It forgot that the coating was harmless and it sort of had to approach it with a little more trepidation.

But if they had been fused for three hours or more and then separated,

it 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 they come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already been here before me.

Right.

So there's no reason to go research this area because there clearly wasn't food there.

Yeah.

And again, here's your 10-minute reminder that slime mold don't have brains or neurons.

So So all of this is just

astounding stuff that we're still trying to get to the bottom of.

Like that habituation thing, they're like, we don't know.

We have no idea, but we're going to go find out.

And maybe in 10 years, we'll be able to explain it.

Right.

So eventually,

you know, the people that are

people that are hip to the slime mold thing are like.

trying to spread the word

they're trying to spread the word and be 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 of reverse engineered it and

we could see what that looked like and how we could use it?

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 molds

algorithms were, but somebody wrote them down.

And Sage Jensen came along and turned them into C

code and basically ran these things as like algorithms and found that these

fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold moving across a petri dish in search of food, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

It was an

art project, basically.

But someone on a team of astrophysicists heard about Sage Jensen's work, and they used it when they were stumped trying to figure out how to map

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 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 yeah these filaments that came out of the big bang

so i guess they went back to sage jensen and said uh first of all sage you c plus plus code isn't that really just b minus code if we're being honest

and he said that's not how it works get out of my way

great coding joke uh thank you It's my only coding joke.

And I just made it's the only coding joke, I think.

No, I think it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Isn't that one of the

dat old timey?

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, they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells, and they put it on a a map with 37,000 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 coding and had the virtual slime 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.

Yeah.

So when the slime mold was finished, they all stood back around.

That's amazing.

How accurate is it?

And they all just realized that they had no idea how to verify it.

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 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 mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together, the structure of it, you know?

What if slime mold is God?

What if we're asleep right now and this is all just one dream, Chuck?

The other cool thing they figured out with the slime mold moving around is when they were researching them, they found that those mazes that they were running them through, they went even faster through the maze when they had some sort of noise, like a bright light or something.

Like we said, they like to go away from things they don't like.

And that negative input of that light basically made them say, all right, let's pick up the pace and

make these decisions quicker and get to that food.

And stop fussing around.

I don't like this light staring at me.

I think we kind of blew some minds today.

I think so.

My mind's definitely been blown.

Did you want to cover the Amazon thing?

Nope.

Okay, good.

That's it for Slime Old, unless you got anything else right now, do you?

I got nothing else.

We'll have to revisit this in 10 years.

And thanks to Dave Ruse for helping us with this one um

and since i said dave ruse i think chuck it means it's time for listener mail

hey guys i'm gonna call this uh night trap

response i just laugh every time i hear those words together now i know night trap uh this is from aaron hey guys just finished the night trap video game show thanks for bringing it to everyone i own the 25th 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 It's had the same style and video camera control quality, and it starred Corey Haim.

Perhaps arguably a little better game, 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 another tour started and make it back to Michigan.

Keep up the good work.

I finish your book and I have the pre-order poster in my office and I've converted friends and family.

So that is from Aaron in Michigan and we're definitely going to start touring again.

I would say probably next year although we haven't really talked much about it.

No, but we need to.

It's definitely starting to get to be time to get talking, I guess.

Although I got to admit, I have not missed the traveling.

I've missed being on stage, but not the traveling part.

Well, you know, that's what they say.

That's what rock stars say.

It's not the heat, it's the humidity.

No, they say that, you know, you get paid to travel.

You don't get paid to play shows.

I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense.

Yeah.

If you can figure out how to get paid for both, then you're really, really doing something right.

Good stuff.

Yeah, and if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit.

We've had a lot of calls over the year for Ann Arbor, so maybe that's where we go.

Yes.

Well,

who is that again?

Aaron.

Aaron, that's what I was going to guess.

Thanks a lot, Aaron.

That was a great email.

Thanks for the Corey Hayne 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 stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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