Tuesday 9 October 2012

Intelligent slime



Brainless slime mould has an external memory
By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature
Slime moulds use a form of spatial "memory" to navigate, despite not having a brain, a study has found. Scientists in Australia studied the organisms in an experiment normally used to test robots. They found that the slime mould could navigate around a U-shaped maze to a food source, using their slimy deposits. Researchers compare its path-finding method to Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb trail. Their full findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."A slime mould is not a fungus or mould, but is in fact a protist, which is really the odds and ends of the natural world that don't fit in with the rest of our taxonomic grouping system," said PhD student Christopher Reid who led the study."They are truly alien creatures and yet they are all around us: all over the world, preying on yeast, bacteria and fungi, out of sight in the undergrowth."

One of the strangest theories I heard about Lake Cryptids and Sea Serpents is that they are like the Portuguese man o' war ,made up of lots of small organisms which then dissipate so it disappears. Maybe they are intelligent slime and that idea is not as far off the mark as I thought. Any theory is as valid as any other until something is proven I  suppose .

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