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Slime Mold: 0% Mold, 100% Amazing · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know. A production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant, and this is stuff
0:19
Speaker 1: you should know. No producer editions, right, it's just just us, buddy,
0:25
Speaker 1: We're gonna do it. We're gonna be just fine. Jerry
0:28
Speaker 1: took an early vacation for Memorial Day. I know she's
0:32
Speaker 1: always doing stuff like that. She knows how to live,
0:35
Speaker 1: and we're stuck with slime mold in her absence. I
0:40
Speaker 1: like slime mold. I knew you would love slime mold.
0:43
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff. It's very
0:46
Speaker 1: Josh Clarkey. It is kind of Josh clarky so much
0:49
Speaker 1: so that, um, as I was researching this, like I mean,
0:52
Speaker 1: I just kind of generally knew about slime mold that
0:55
Speaker 1: it exhibited, you know, some weird level of intelligence here there,
0:59
Speaker 1: but I didn't know much about it. And then as
1:01
Speaker 1: I was researching, I was like, I'm kind of into
1:03
Speaker 1: slime mold now, like all the different kinds of it.
1:06
Speaker 1: I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight
1:09
Speaker 1: year old I never was. And then you're like, let
1:11
Speaker 1: me Clark this over to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes,
1:14
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I like slime old too. I think it's
1:16
Speaker 1: kind of cool. Uh, let's do it, okay, Chuck, I'm
1:20
Speaker 1: ready al right, everybody stand back because we are doing it. Yeah,
1:24
Speaker 1: and I think you could file this. I mean, it's
1:27
Speaker 1: not an animal, slime mold. I guess we should just
1:29
Speaker 1: tell you right away. It's not an animal. It's not
1:32
Speaker 1: a fungus, even though you would think it's a fungus
1:36
Speaker 1: if you saw it on the forest floor. And we'll
1:37
Speaker 1: get to all this stuff, but it feels like an
1:42
Speaker 1: animal one of our animal episodes anyway, sort of. Yeah,
1:46
Speaker 1: I was gonna save the fact that it's not an
1:48
Speaker 1: animal or fungus or at the very end, but sure
1:50
Speaker 1: we could do it at the beginning. I get like,
1:52
Speaker 1: literally in the last minute, they were like, I still
1:54
Speaker 1: don't know what this is. An animal is it's a
1:56
Speaker 1: dog in disguise. You know everything we just told you about.
1:59
Speaker 1: It's not an animal, it's not even a fungus. And
2:02
Speaker 1: then we just go to listener maw. Uh So what
2:05
Speaker 1: is it though, besides super ancient as in like maybe
2:08
Speaker 1: one of the very first living things. Well, it's a
2:11
Speaker 1: protest actually, they figured out and protests seems to be, well,
2:14
Speaker 1: it's one of the five main kingdoms animal bacteria, plants,
2:19
Speaker 1: fun guy and then protests and protests are typically single
2:23
Speaker 1: celled organisms like amba um or protozoans, things like that,
2:28
Speaker 1: and they have I don't I couldn't find out exactly
2:32
Speaker 1: when they did it, but they fairly recently, I guess
2:34
Speaker 1: in the history of biology, fairly recently reclassified slime molds
2:40
Speaker 1: from the Kingdom fun Guy over to the Kingdom Protista. Yeah,
2:44
Speaker 1: which is interesting because for years they have been studied
2:48
Speaker 1: by mycologists who are fun fun guys. And they found
2:52
Speaker 1: out later they were like, you know what, sorry, they
2:55
Speaker 1: should really go over to the protestologists, and they said,
2:59
Speaker 1: we kind of like these guys. Can we keep studying
3:01
Speaker 1: them since we have been And they said sure. In
3:04
Speaker 1: the protastologists were superbissed. They were they were. They're still
3:10
Speaker 1: actually not over it. They're frequently t peeing the academic
3:14
Speaker 1: halls of the my collogists whenever they get the chance.
3:16
Speaker 1: It's very bitter battle. So um, that is pretty cute
3:20
Speaker 1: that they that the fun guy people are are still
3:23
Speaker 1: studying slime molds even though they're not Fun Guy. But um,
3:26
Speaker 1: there's you know, some good reasons why they were originally
3:29
Speaker 1: considered to be fun Guy. Mostly that they're like these
3:33
Speaker 1: big kind of clumps, and there's all sorts of different
3:36
Speaker 1: ways that they take shape and form depending on the species.
3:39
Speaker 1: They're different colors. Some of them form kind of net
3:42
Speaker 1: like honeycomb structures. So the look like dog barf one
3:46
Speaker 1: of the main ones we'll talk about today looks a
3:48
Speaker 1: lot like dog barf. Um. They look like the fungus though,
3:51
Speaker 1: Like if you're walking in the woods and you saw
3:53
Speaker 1: this nine out it's in, people would say, well, it's
3:55
Speaker 1: got to be some kind of fungus. Yeah, especially because
3:58
Speaker 1: if you're staring at them, you would have to stare
4:01
Speaker 1: at them for about five, six, ten hours to see that.
4:06
Speaker 1: They have a huge difference between them and fun Guy.
4:09
Speaker 1: And they move. They just move so slowly it's not
4:13
Speaker 1: apparent to the to the naked eye. But if you
4:16
Speaker 1: if you film these things with time lapse cameras, uh
4:19
Speaker 1: and speed it up, you can see, oh, they very
4:22
Speaker 1: clearly move about from place to place. So, um, that's
4:25
Speaker 1: a big differentiator between them and fun Guy. But one
4:28
Speaker 1: of the reasons they thought they were like funger, that
4:30
Speaker 1: they were funkers because they produced spores to reproduce, right,
4:34
Speaker 1: and I mentioned their ancient origins. Uh, they are about
4:38
Speaker 1: a billion years old, and like I said, could be
4:42
Speaker 1: like as soon as there was stuff, it seems like
4:44
Speaker 1: there was slime mold eating basically eating the bacteria that
4:49
Speaker 1: breaks down other stuff that dies, and that's what they
4:52
Speaker 1: feed on. Bacteria, mold, yeast, basically anything that decomposes dead things.
4:58
Speaker 1: Slime molds in gulf. I think it's it's not called photography.
5:02
Speaker 1: It's called phigot trophy. Oh yeah, it's a little It's
5:07
Speaker 1: not how I was going to say it, But what
5:08
Speaker 1: are we gonna trophy? Yeah, but I think you're absolutely right. Well,
5:13
Speaker 1: you know us, it wouldn't be as if we didn't.
5:15
Speaker 1: Probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when you
5:19
Speaker 1: basically surround something and then gulf it and just sort
5:23
Speaker 1: of like move it into your body just like sort
5:26
Speaker 1: of absorb it basically. Yeah, which is another difference between
5:30
Speaker 1: slime molds and fungi, because funk i actually break the
5:32
Speaker 1: food down and then absorb the broken down nutrients. But
5:36
Speaker 1: the fact is, if you have things that are decomposing
5:39
Speaker 1: other things like bacteria, molds, yeast, the things that that
5:43
Speaker 1: crawl onto or grow on dead people, dead trees, all
5:47
Speaker 1: that stuff to break them back down into their constituents.
5:51
Speaker 1: So the fact that those the slime mold feeds on
5:53
Speaker 1: other things, it makes it a really important part of
5:55
Speaker 1: the food web, part of the nutrient cycle, because other
5:59
Speaker 1: things them along and eat the slime molds. Um. There's
6:03
Speaker 1: apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized jaw
6:07
Speaker 1: that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I think
6:10
Speaker 1: some kinds of insect larva eat them and then so
6:12
Speaker 1: it just kind of keeps going. But they're a really
6:14
Speaker 1: important part where you just have these microbes that like
6:17
Speaker 1: the beetle couldn't get to that they're able to basically
6:20
Speaker 1: get that energy from you know, the bacteria by eating
6:24
Speaker 1: the slime mold. Right, and even though other protests can
6:28
Speaker 1: carry disease, slime mold is quite human friendly. Actually, uh,
6:33
Speaker 1: you can eat the stuff if you want. There's a
6:35
Speaker 1: dish in Mexico and some parts of Mexico called Coca
6:38
Speaker 1: de Luna, which is exactly what you think it is.
6:42
Speaker 1: Poop poop of the moon, moon poop, and uh, they
6:46
Speaker 1: eat this stuff. I even looked online to try and
6:48
Speaker 1: get a good recipe, but um, it's not on like
6:52
Speaker 1: the pages of Martha Stewart Living like it's you got
6:54
Speaker 1: to dive deep into Reddit and stuff like that to
6:56
Speaker 1: get some good recipes. It seems like almost almost smacks
7:01
Speaker 1: of urban legend. But I'm seeing it in different enough
7:04
Speaker 1: forms that I think it's probable that it actually is
7:08
Speaker 1: a thing. The thing that scares me is that people say,
7:11
Speaker 1: like in some regions of Mexico, it's like, that's not
7:14
Speaker 1: super specific, you know. True. Uh, and and we pointed
7:18
Speaker 1: out they weren't animals or plants, but we definitely need
7:21
Speaker 1: to point out that slime old is also not mold
7:24
Speaker 1: as a protest. That's right. So um. One of the
7:29
Speaker 1: one of the really amazing things about slime mold is, um,
7:32
Speaker 1: there's a couple of different kinds, as we'll talk about
7:34
Speaker 1: in a second, but one a whole bunch of different
7:38
Speaker 1: kinds of species. One type of slime mold can get
7:41
Speaker 1: really big. I mean, some of them can get up
7:44
Speaker 1: to the size of like a medium or pizza large pizza,
7:48
Speaker 1: I guess, depending on whether you're getting ripped off by
7:49
Speaker 1: your pizza guy. But like twelve inches in diameter. That's enormous, right,
7:54
Speaker 1: So you're like, well, that's pretty cool. It's a big
7:56
Speaker 1: blob of mold. Well, put your sock carters on, because
7:59
Speaker 1: I'm about blow your socks right off your feet. Some
8:02
Speaker 1: of those types of slime mold that are as big
8:04
Speaker 1: as a pizza are one giant cell. Yeah, I mean,
8:08
Speaker 1: this is truly amazing. The plasmodial slime mold, which is
8:12
Speaker 1: I guess you could call it one of the true
8:14
Speaker 1: slime mold. Is it has all the stuff like as
8:18
Speaker 1: if it were undergoing cellular division, and all the all
8:21
Speaker 1: the different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all
8:25
Speaker 1: that stuff. But it's just not it doesn't have cell walls.
8:29
Speaker 1: It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and
8:32
Speaker 1: lives inside this giant fortress wall. Yeah. It's almost like
8:36
Speaker 1: if you took all the cells that should have made
8:38
Speaker 1: this giant blob um up as a multicellular organism and
8:43
Speaker 1: just kind of broke them open and dumped all the
8:45
Speaker 1: contents into this blob and then through the cell walls away.
8:49
Speaker 1: That's what you would have it's it's interesting, it is,
8:51
Speaker 1: and it's it's really kind of straightforward if you if
8:54
Speaker 1: you just hear it. But it's also really easy to
8:56
Speaker 1: to just keep going like wait, wait, why why is
8:59
Speaker 1: it like dead? And how is it like this? What's
9:01
Speaker 1: going on here? Which is one of those things that
9:03
Speaker 1: it just it makes slime old. It's its own thing.
9:06
Speaker 1: And we're still learning about this stuff, you know, every day. Yeah,
9:11
Speaker 1: and it I mean it gets there's quite a few
9:13
Speaker 1: times in here where we're gonna say, and here's where
9:15
Speaker 1: it gets even crazier. Uh, this isn't super crazy. But
9:20
Speaker 1: the the other kind of slime mold um or the
9:23
Speaker 1: other big broad categories a cellular slime mold, and these
9:26
Speaker 1: are lots of individual, single celled organisms. But the kind
9:31
Speaker 1: of knockout fact about them is when they're stressed out,
9:35
Speaker 1: if they don't have a lot of food around, they
9:37
Speaker 1: can join up together and sort of look like one
9:43
Speaker 1: of those plasmodial slime molds. But it's not. It's called
9:46
Speaker 1: I guess pseudo plasmodial yeah, because it's not a real one.
9:51
Speaker 1: But it basically says, all right, we're gonna all come
9:53
Speaker 1: together to try and find food together. And then when
9:56
Speaker 1: they do have food, they can be like, all right,
9:58
Speaker 1: we'll just go along our merryway and split up again, yeah,
10:01
Speaker 1: which is pretty nuts. They also will come together, um
10:04
Speaker 1: Apparently it makes it harder for predators like those specialized
10:07
Speaker 1: beetles to eat them, because those individual slime molds can
10:11
Speaker 1: be you know, a millimeter in size or smaller. Um,
10:16
Speaker 1: So it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that.
10:18
Speaker 1: It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the
10:20
Speaker 1: size of like, you know, a quarter. Right, So they
10:23
Speaker 1: actually do come together. They come together to move. They
10:26
Speaker 1: also come together to reproduce and produce spores. But the
10:30
Speaker 1: characteristic of this that what makes it a pseudoplasmodium rather
10:34
Speaker 1: than actual true slime mold, is that they retain their
10:38
Speaker 1: cell walls, their individual cells when they come together. They
10:41
Speaker 1: just kind of loosely formed together. In a really good
10:44
Speaker 1: way of understanding what this the cellular slime molds created,
10:48
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a swarm. Yeah, that's a good
10:51
Speaker 1: way to put it, I think. Or what's the god
10:54
Speaker 1: that my favorite thing when the birds do that, what's
10:56
Speaker 1: that called? Uh flock of seagulls haircut? That's it? Uh
11:05
Speaker 1: uh boy, you threw me there. So these the plasmodium
11:09
Speaker 1: is covered by a layer of slime, and you're gonna
11:11
Speaker 1: want to put a pin in this because when they
11:13
Speaker 1: do move around, they leave behind a little these little
11:17
Speaker 1: collapse tubules and it looks basically like not exactly like
11:21
Speaker 1: a snail trail, but sort of like a layer of slime.
11:24
Speaker 1: And you're gonna want to remember that for later on,
11:26
Speaker 1: because he's actually kind of served as important little markers.
11:30
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, write, write it down. Everybody
11:32
Speaker 1: will wait until you get a pen, a piece of paper.
11:35
Speaker 1: Go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah, put
11:40
Speaker 1: on your mask by pen, yep, by a piece of paper.
11:43
Speaker 1: Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for
11:45
Speaker 1: that pen. Really, oh my god. Pin mark up as
11:49
Speaker 1: big as CDs. I think the general mark up as
11:52
Speaker 1: CVS fairly high. They're like, we get him in here
11:54
Speaker 1: for the aspirin, then we really juice them with this
11:56
Speaker 1: ballpoint pen. I hope there's no CBS ads in this episode,
12:01
Speaker 1: but we'll find out. What is what's a good deal
12:04
Speaker 1: at a drug store? Is there like a zero? They
12:08
Speaker 1: all mark it up? Yeah, everything's marked up because it's
12:11
Speaker 1: like it's like convenience kind of thing. You sound like
12:14
Speaker 1: a lot of sound like a grandfather. It's all marked up.
12:17
Speaker 1: Back in my day, you just go to a regular
12:20
Speaker 1: grocery store and buy your pens from the ben factory,
12:24
Speaker 1: straight from the man who made It's right. Uh. You know,
12:27
Speaker 1: when I was little, we would uh for a short time.
12:30
Speaker 1: I'm not sure why we did this, because it's not
12:32
Speaker 1: like we lived out in the country and this is
12:34
Speaker 1: a very old timey country thing to do. We bought
12:36
Speaker 1: our milk direct from a farm and we would pull
12:39
Speaker 1: up and and uh, I would get to walk inside
12:42
Speaker 1: this huge walk in cooler, like next to a loading dock,
12:44
Speaker 1: and I just thought it was like the coolest thing
12:46
Speaker 1: in the world. Somehow to get that fresh milk. Sure
12:49
Speaker 1: didn't they. They back the cow up and it makes
12:52
Speaker 1: a beeping sound, and they just scored the milk right
12:55
Speaker 1: into the back of your station Wagon's right, they mark
12:57
Speaker 1: it up first, wash your way home. Uh so where
13:01
Speaker 1: were we? Okay? If you do see this stuff in
13:03
Speaker 1: the woods, if you ever hiking along and you see
13:06
Speaker 1: a big or medium size pizza like yellow blob or
13:11
Speaker 1: orange blob, they can be red. They can be white.
13:15
Speaker 1: They can be maroon very rarely, they can be black, blue,
13:18
Speaker 1: or green, but usually it's sort of yellow or an orange.
13:23
Speaker 1: And you see that in the forest, you're probably looking
13:25
Speaker 1: at a slime mold. Yeah, especially if it's really hot
13:29
Speaker 1: out and it just rained. Yeah, the the worst thing
13:33
Speaker 1: in the world for me. You can also see them
13:35
Speaker 1: like on your grass too. Apparently if it gets really
13:38
Speaker 1: rainy and hot, slime molds will actually come out of
13:41
Speaker 1: the woods into your grass and be like, oh, this
13:43
Speaker 1: is pretty nice, and um, they aren't gonna do any harm.
13:47
Speaker 1: That's not a problem for your grass. It just looks
13:49
Speaker 1: kind of gross. It's certainly not gonna hurt you or
13:51
Speaker 1: your pets. And then eventually it'll dry up and turn
13:54
Speaker 1: to kind of a gray or tamp powder and blow away,
13:57
Speaker 1: and that means that it just turned into spores and
13:59
Speaker 1: it just reproduced all over your place. Yeah. I think
14:03
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a break because right now people
14:05
Speaker 1: are probably like, dudes, you promised greatness here and so
14:11
Speaker 1: far it's a little hum drum what So put those
14:14
Speaker 1: soft garters back on, because when we come back, we're
14:18
Speaker 1: really going to start knocking them off with some of
14:20
Speaker 1: these amazing facts Okay, Chuck, we set them up. Let's
14:48
Speaker 1: knock him back down. So here's one cool fact is
14:53
Speaker 1: that slime molds basically can do the equivalent and do
14:58
Speaker 1: the equivalent of throwing themselves the grenade. Uh. They will
15:02
Speaker 1: sacrifice themselves to save others. And these are things without
15:05
Speaker 1: a brain or a central nervous system. Like, it's not
15:07
Speaker 1: like they think, I'm feeling empathy today for my fellow
15:11
Speaker 1: mold and so I'm gonna save everybody because I've come
15:14
Speaker 1: across some infectious bacteria. But what they do is they
15:18
Speaker 1: come across it, they engulf it, and then they say,
15:22
Speaker 1: let me go, and they cut themselves off from the pack,
15:25
Speaker 1: from the swarm and detach themselves and die of that infection,
15:30
Speaker 1: but save the rest of the group. And um, my
15:34
Speaker 1: heart will go on place in the background as they
15:38
Speaker 1: get further and further away, exactly. That's that's altruism, Yeah,
15:42
Speaker 1: which is pretty amazing considering, like you said, they don't
15:44
Speaker 1: have a brain or anything like that. So how how
15:47
Speaker 1: are they doing this? We'll get to that later. So
15:51
Speaker 1: what about tell everyone about the uh dicti stelli um
15:55
Speaker 1: disc discoitus disc discoides. Okay, that's one of my favorite
16:00
Speaker 1: words now disco Whiteyscau's disco in it. So that this
16:04
Speaker 1: was this is a kind of um cellular um slime mold, right,
16:09
Speaker 1: So it's made up of a bunch of different individual
16:12
Speaker 1: organisms that come together. And when they come together they
16:17
Speaker 1: practice altruism to some degree as well, because some of
16:20
Speaker 1: them will basically be like, Okay, I'm dead, now I'm dead.
16:23
Speaker 1: I'm gonna turn into a bundle of cellulose fibers, and
16:27
Speaker 1: that cellulose is going to connect with other slime mold
16:31
Speaker 1: cells that have died and turned into cellulose and come
16:34
Speaker 1: together and form a stalk. And then the top of
16:37
Speaker 1: the stalk, a bunch of different um slime mold cells
16:41
Speaker 1: they're called slugs when they're individual like that, will climb
16:44
Speaker 1: up the stalk and then they'll turn into spores. And
16:47
Speaker 1: then in that way they're sticking up out of the
16:48
Speaker 1: ground and a passing animal will come and they'll stick
16:52
Speaker 1: to it and it'll get a ride to greener pastures.
16:55
Speaker 1: But to do that, some of them have to die
16:58
Speaker 1: to form this talked to to let the spores grow
17:02
Speaker 1: on top of which is pretty amazing itself. It is
17:05
Speaker 1: uh And you know we mentioned that they move. You know,
17:08
Speaker 1: they're not. They don't just sit around and wait for
17:10
Speaker 1: someone to drop a pepperoni near their pizza shape and
17:14
Speaker 1: the woods so they can eat it. They gotta go
17:16
Speaker 1: where the food is. And they either moved by these
17:19
Speaker 1: little appendages that like little feet like appendages. Those are
17:22
Speaker 1: the cellular slime olds, the individual single celled organisms that
17:26
Speaker 1: can come together, or and this is crazy, the the
17:30
Speaker 1: other kind. They move as one big mass because you know,
17:33
Speaker 1: there's no cell wall going on, so they just sort
17:35
Speaker 1: of expand and contract the cytoplasm to kind of gush
17:39
Speaker 1: their way along the ground very slowly. Yeah, which is
17:43
Speaker 1: really neat to see because when they're especially when they're
17:46
Speaker 1: searching for food, which is basically all they're ever doing.
17:49
Speaker 1: Everything that they do is either to get away from
17:51
Speaker 1: some noxious stimuli or to go toward food. Usually to
17:55
Speaker 1: go toward food. It sounds like us it basically I
18:00
Speaker 1: don't like that, but I like that smell. I'm gonna
18:04
Speaker 1: go toward that. So um. They make these amazing kind
18:09
Speaker 1: of they look almost like sea fans, you know what
18:12
Speaker 1: I'm talking about That they look very fractally and they
18:15
Speaker 1: just kind of they fan out. Is the best way
18:17
Speaker 1: to put it, when they start to go look for food,
18:20
Speaker 1: and when they do find food, they start moving toward it.
18:23
Speaker 1: It's the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way,
18:27
Speaker 1: and next thing, you know, over a very long period
18:29
Speaker 1: of time, five days later, the the slime mold has moved.
18:35
Speaker 1: And actually slime molds um if you don't they like
18:38
Speaker 1: they they're totally fine living in peatree dishes for as
18:41
Speaker 1: long as you want them to um, as long as
18:44
Speaker 1: you feed them. If you stop feeding them, they'll just
18:47
Speaker 1: get out of the peatree dish and start looking for
18:49
Speaker 1: food elsewhere, so they'll they'll escape. Yeah, but I mean again,
18:54
Speaker 1: it's not like you're just sitting there watching this thing
18:56
Speaker 1: crawl out of it's petrie dishes. You leave overnight and
18:59
Speaker 1: you forget to feed the thing and you come back
19:01
Speaker 1: and it's half of it is out onto the table
19:04
Speaker 1: or something like. It's something like a bread out of
19:06
Speaker 1: gremlins kind of you. And I think you said they
19:09
Speaker 1: moved about a millimeter an hour, but some of them actually,
19:12
Speaker 1: if they're really cooking, can go about an inch and
19:15
Speaker 1: a half in an hour, which that's really fast. I mean,
19:18
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound fast. But when you're talking about what
19:20
Speaker 1: we're talking about, it is pretty fast. Yeah, um, and
19:23
Speaker 1: I saw that a couple of places. Most people cite
19:26
Speaker 1: something like a millimeter an hour. I can't remember which
19:28
Speaker 1: one goes that fast, but yeah, I mean, you can't
19:31
Speaker 1: see it moving when you're staring at it, but over
19:33
Speaker 1: time you can for sure. You know, if you're just
19:36
Speaker 1: really patient and you can lock in on something, you
19:39
Speaker 1: might be able to see that. So when they started
19:43
Speaker 1: figuring out in the early two thousands, of Japanese researchers
19:47
Speaker 1: were some of the first to like really study slime
19:49
Speaker 1: molds as as showing some sort of intelligence. They figured
19:52
Speaker 1: this out from you know, from watching these things actually
19:55
Speaker 1: move about and when you when you film them and
19:59
Speaker 1: um that like high speed and then replay it, you
20:02
Speaker 1: can see their movements are deliberate in a lot of ways.
20:06
Speaker 1: They're they're not just blind dumb movements where they happen
20:09
Speaker 1: on to um food. They clearly consense food somehow or
20:14
Speaker 1: some way, and they spread out um and they seemed
20:18
Speaker 1: to spread out and again in a really deliberate way.
20:21
Speaker 1: And so some some researchers started to um test slime
20:25
Speaker 1: molds to see what they were capable of. One of
20:28
Speaker 1: the first one one of the first researchers was a
20:32
Speaker 1: Japanese scientist named toshi Yuki Nakagaki, and UM, I think
20:37
Speaker 1: so too, and Dr Nakagaki, which is even better. Um
20:42
Speaker 1: built a maze, like a pretty simple maze, but in
20:44
Speaker 1: actual three dimensional maze and a good sized peach tree
20:47
Speaker 1: dish put um what what has come to be known
20:51
Speaker 1: as probably the smartest size slime mold, Farium polycephalum, which
20:57
Speaker 1: is kind of like the rock star of the slime
20:58
Speaker 1: mold world these days, put a psarium in it and said,
21:02
Speaker 1: go to town, go find your little favorite oat flake treat,
21:06
Speaker 1: which is their their favorite food. Yeah, And the key
21:09
Speaker 1: here is is there were four different routes to two
21:12
Speaker 1: different endpoints where this food was. It wasn't just like
21:16
Speaker 1: there's only one way to solve this maze. And so
21:19
Speaker 1: they put the little oat flake at these endpoints, and uh,
21:23
Speaker 1: the microorganisms that grow on the oat flakes is what
21:25
Speaker 1: they're after. That's not like they love oatmeal or anything
21:27
Speaker 1: like that. And so he put them there and studied them,
21:32
Speaker 1: and over the course of hours, these things basically learned
21:37
Speaker 1: to get to that food in the quickest fastest way
21:41
Speaker 1: every single time. Yeah, like it could, it could conceivably
21:46
Speaker 1: get to it, like you said, four different ways, but
21:49
Speaker 1: that fast way was the way that it would. Just like,
21:51
Speaker 1: that's impressive. That that's definitely not worthy. You can write
21:54
Speaker 1: multiple papers on that kind of study. And so another
21:57
Speaker 1: Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sack, a
22:01
Speaker 1: researcher name at Sushi Taro from Okkaido University. Did you
22:06
Speaker 1: like that? Yeah, that's good? And um Dr Tiro said,
22:10
Speaker 1: all right, what about this? What if we take some
22:12
Speaker 1: oat flakes and basically make a general map of the
22:16
Speaker 1: neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime old does
22:21
Speaker 1: with that? Put a little slime old in a petrie
22:23
Speaker 1: dish with these oat flakes that kind of mimic the
22:24
Speaker 1: neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched to go I think over
22:28
Speaker 1: the course of like four or five days. Right, yeah,
22:31
Speaker 1: and you might think cool. It does what it does
22:35
Speaker 1: and it goes after that food in the most direct
22:37
Speaker 1: way possible, which is what it did. But here's where
22:40
Speaker 1: it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they
22:46
Speaker 1: overlaid a map of the current Tokyo Railway commuter system,
22:51
Speaker 1: the subway system, and they laid it over this grid
22:55
Speaker 1: the slime and it was almost a perfect match. That nuts,
23:00
Speaker 1: that's I mean, I had to reread that like five
23:04
Speaker 1: times to even believe that that's what happened. That this
23:07
Speaker 1: line basically figured out the most efficient route to get
23:12
Speaker 1: around essentially Tokyo. Yes, which I mean humans had figured
23:17
Speaker 1: out too, but it took teams of human engineers and
23:21
Speaker 1: a very long time for them to figure this out. Right,
23:24
Speaker 1: So the slime mold was just like, this is this
23:26
Speaker 1: is nothing. What else you got? You got any more
23:29
Speaker 1: cities that are more densely populated with more neighborhoods, because
23:31
Speaker 1: I'll just make your subway maps all day long basically,
23:34
Speaker 1: and they're like, Tokyo is probably one of the most debts, right, Okay.
23:39
Speaker 1: I saw another um another similar kind of a bit
23:43
Speaker 1: of research chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to
23:47
Speaker 1: signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. This is this
23:52
Speaker 1: is crazy. It's like an archaeological study, um. And they
23:56
Speaker 1: put some they six some fiserium on it and fis
23:59
Speaker 1: um on it, and it mimicked ancient Roman roads that
24:04
Speaker 1: had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten,
24:09
Speaker 1: and ones that were well known in the Balkans. It
24:13
Speaker 1: mimics these these Roman roads like things that people have
24:16
Speaker 1: been like, Okay, this is the best route from this
24:17
Speaker 1: city to this city. The slime mold did basically the
24:21
Speaker 1: same thing and and apparently revealed some lost stuff. Yeah,
24:25
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it could. Also It's interesting like
24:27
Speaker 1: if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment
24:30
Speaker 1: like this, does that mean like the humans get it wrong?
24:35
Speaker 1: Like can they use this as a test and be like, sorry,
24:37
Speaker 1: the slime old is spoken. I guess so. I kind
24:41
Speaker 1: of like the octopus picking the World Cup. You know,
24:44
Speaker 1: they always take the World Cup away if the other
24:46
Speaker 1: team that the octopus didn't. Yeah, well, I wonder if
24:50
Speaker 1: you I mean, and we'll get to the real applications
24:53
Speaker 1: of this, but I wonder if they could do something
24:54
Speaker 1: like that where they let's say they look at the
24:56
Speaker 1: Tokyo system in a couple of places that didn't match,
24:59
Speaker 1: They're like, we totally should have gone this way. Yes,
25:03
Speaker 1: I feel like that that is the direction that people
25:06
Speaker 1: are kind of going in that they could conceivably use
25:09
Speaker 1: this for planning new stuff. You know. Wow, So every
25:14
Speaker 1: city planner we'll have a slime mold researcher at their best. Yeah,
25:19
Speaker 1: I mean, like, this is crazy. Why not? You know,
25:23
Speaker 1: all you have to do is have some oat flakes
25:25
Speaker 1: and a Petri dish and you're good. So I think
25:28
Speaker 1: we should take another break. What do you think? Quite frankly,
25:31
Speaker 1: we want to eat some oat flakes right about now.
25:33
Speaker 1: I'm kinda in the move for that too. We'll be
25:37
Speaker 1: right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes?
26:05
Speaker 1: I did not. All right, we'll get you something, because
26:08
Speaker 1: here's the secret, everybody, when we take a break, we
26:11
Speaker 1: don't really go take a break. No, we should have
26:15
Speaker 1: had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and
26:18
Speaker 1: just eating them real quick. I I don't know, I
26:20
Speaker 1: can't see. So all right, we've said that these things
26:23
Speaker 1: don't have brains. They don't have and I don't think
26:25
Speaker 1: we mentioned that. It's not like they have like it's
26:28
Speaker 1: not like their jellyfish and they have some sort of
26:30
Speaker 1: weird neural net. They got nothing like that at all,
26:34
Speaker 1: nothing like they have no way of of generating consciousness
26:39
Speaker 1: in any form that we recognize. And yet slime old
26:43
Speaker 1: is teaching us to open and open our horizons um
26:47
Speaker 1: in hearts to sure two new ideas of what constitutes
26:51
Speaker 1: consciousness and intelligence. You know what I'm saying, Like it
26:54
Speaker 1: makes sense as a swarm, as a bunch of cellular
26:57
Speaker 1: as cellular slime mold makes sense. We're already familiar with
27:01
Speaker 1: the hive mind, and you know, the emergent property of
27:04
Speaker 1: a bunch of different things, you know, operating together. The
27:07
Speaker 1: real puzzler, though, is the the single cell plasmodial slime
27:12
Speaker 1: mold that's one big giant cell and the fact that
27:15
Speaker 1: it behaves in ways that seemed conscious to some degree. Yeah.
27:20
Speaker 1: So if you want to kind of go back in
27:22
Speaker 1: time to where a lot of this rearch research started,
27:26
Speaker 1: it wasn't actually in Japan, but it was in the
27:28
Speaker 1: nineties sixties physicist named Evelyn Fox. Keller was curious if
27:35
Speaker 1: she could use math to model biological systems because they
27:40
Speaker 1: had had success using math to explain and expand our
27:44
Speaker 1: understanding of physics. So she was like, let me see
27:46
Speaker 1: if we can do this with biology, and someone said, well,
27:49
Speaker 1: you gotta meet Lead Siegel. Siegel, is you got a
27:53
Speaker 1: little surprise for you? And Lee Siegel got together and said, oh,
27:57
Speaker 1: Dr Keller, you need to meet our end slime mold.
28:01
Speaker 1: And Dr Kell is like, this is the nineteen sixties.
28:04
Speaker 1: I don't know what slime mold is yet. And Keller
28:07
Speaker 1: and sorry Siegel said oh, we'll just take a seat
28:09
Speaker 1: and let me tell you about this, uh, which is
28:13
Speaker 1: dicto dictio still stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictio stellium disc goidium.
28:24
Speaker 1: I think the discoids discoidium Yeah, okay, but it's the
28:29
Speaker 1: one we were talking about earlier that that creates the stems.
28:32
Speaker 1: They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the sports, right.
28:35
Speaker 1: And I think this was just significant because it was
28:37
Speaker 1: kind of like the first time anyone had observed and
28:41
Speaker 1: you know, fell off of their lab stool and could
28:43
Speaker 1: explain it to others, these pseudo plasmodiums. But what they
28:47
Speaker 1: were missing was they were like, all right, we see
28:49
Speaker 1: this happening, and it's amazing and how are they doing this? Though?
28:53
Speaker 1: And the very first thing they thought of is like,
28:56
Speaker 1: maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe
28:58
Speaker 1: there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell or maybe
29:02
Speaker 1: a few of them. They get together and they just
29:04
Speaker 1: sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and
29:08
Speaker 1: say go this way, and the rest are just sort
29:10
Speaker 1: of the worker ants that follow along. Yeah, And they
29:14
Speaker 1: knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical
29:18
Speaker 1: a MP, which is related to a t P, the
29:21
Speaker 1: dino cine triphosphate um, and that that was how they
29:26
Speaker 1: were signaling. But they thought that that like you're saying,
29:29
Speaker 1: that there are just a few signaling, everybody else was responding.
29:32
Speaker 1: And what they figured out is that that they had
29:33
Speaker 1: that totally wrong. That there weren't leaders, There weren't pacemakers
29:37
Speaker 1: who were in charge of like you know, signaling and
29:40
Speaker 1: an effect making decisions for the group. That it was
29:42
Speaker 1: actually like a group effort, and that the the whatever
29:46
Speaker 1: um whatever cell or slug that they're called in this
29:50
Speaker 1: cellular slime mold swarm was closest to food. It would
29:55
Speaker 1: signal with a MP that hey, there's some food over here,
29:59
Speaker 1: let's all go over this way, and that signal would
30:01
Speaker 1: just kind of be passed along through the swarm, through
30:04
Speaker 1: the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move
30:06
Speaker 1: toward the food and start eating. Yeah, and this was
30:09
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, you can see why they went
30:11
Speaker 1: in that initial direction because it made sense, and a
30:14
Speaker 1: lot of nature is organized with the top down principle.
30:18
Speaker 1: In mind, humans often organized with the top down principle
30:22
Speaker 1: big business, government. It's just a it's a system that
30:26
Speaker 1: we're used to seeing in in nature and in people,
30:30
Speaker 1: and so it made sense that they went that way,
30:31
Speaker 1: and they never they never really thought about the fact
30:34
Speaker 1: that it could be like, no, there, Uh, it's a
30:37
Speaker 1: total bottom up system and whatever is closest can sig
30:40
Speaker 1: send out these signals. Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy,
30:45
Speaker 1: it's more like, um, it's like it's like how a
30:47
Speaker 1: flock of birds operate. So a flock of seagulls haircut
30:51
Speaker 1: operates where they run so far away. Yeah, but it's
30:55
Speaker 1: the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from is
30:59
Speaker 1: the first to run and everybody else follows. Is kind
31:01
Speaker 1: of like how a flock of birds will turn depending
31:04
Speaker 1: on you know, which way they need to turn based
31:06
Speaker 1: on that bird making that decision, and the rest of
31:09
Speaker 1: the flock flock basically following it to bottom up, bottom
31:12
Speaker 1: up decision making kind of thing. And so we started
31:15
Speaker 1: to learn a lot and we know a lot about
31:18
Speaker 1: bottom up decision making now as opposed to when these
31:21
Speaker 1: guys were working back in the sixties, I think UM.
31:25
Speaker 1: But in the twenty one century, that whole idea of
31:27
Speaker 1: bottom up decision making or decentralized UM decision making UM
31:33
Speaker 1: has become a real component in in UH artificial intelligence
31:37
Speaker 1: design because if you've listened to the End of the
31:40
Speaker 1: World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the
31:42
Speaker 1: hardest things in the world to do is program something
31:45
Speaker 1: to understand everything, because you have to input all the
31:49
Speaker 1: stuff it needs to know. Whereas if you can just
31:52
Speaker 1: kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to
31:54
Speaker 1: let the machine think for itself, you you finally got something. Yeah,
32:00
Speaker 1: and I would imagine I didn't see this anywhere, but
32:02
Speaker 1: it seems like this might could have some applications in
32:04
Speaker 1: nanotechnology as well, like the idea that we could program,
32:09
Speaker 1: you know, billions of tiny little nanobot bugs to clean
32:13
Speaker 1: the windows of your house every day, like a lot
32:16
Speaker 1: of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Uh am I
32:21
Speaker 1: base there or could that potentially be a thing? Not
32:25
Speaker 1: at all. I think it totally could be a thing.
32:26
Speaker 1: It's it's anytime you have a huge amount of things
32:29
Speaker 1: that you're trying to all get to do roughly the
32:31
Speaker 1: same thing, but they need to not you know, uh,
32:35
Speaker 1: redouble their efforts or um replicate their efforts. So you
32:40
Speaker 1: don't want one cleaning one part of the window and
32:43
Speaker 1: the other one coming over and cleaning the the same
32:45
Speaker 1: part of the window that's already clean. Um. All you
32:48
Speaker 1: have to do is figure out how to teach them
32:50
Speaker 1: if if this happens, do this, and if you can
32:54
Speaker 1: figure out how to strip it down to a basic
32:57
Speaker 1: enough algorithm that could conceiveable be used for just about
33:03
Speaker 1: any situation. Um, you've got the key to the universe
33:07
Speaker 1: in your hand. Like there's actually we'll have to do
33:09
Speaker 1: a um An episode on it one day. But I
33:11
Speaker 1: read an article about a guy who was I think
33:14
Speaker 1: he was a physicist back in the eighties who was like,
33:16
Speaker 1: I think the universe is basically an operating system. That
33:21
Speaker 1: is that is that it goes down to two. There's
33:24
Speaker 1: two bits. You could say it's black and white, one
33:28
Speaker 1: or zero, it doesn't matter, but there are two kinds
33:31
Speaker 1: of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form,
33:35
Speaker 1: everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime, mold,
33:41
Speaker 1: everything comes out of these two types of bits that
33:44
Speaker 1: basically make up the fabric of space and time, interacting
33:47
Speaker 1: with one another and increasingly sophisticated patterns. And that is
33:52
Speaker 1: exactly what you're talking about. So if we can figure
33:55
Speaker 1: out what that that computation is, what those algorithms are
33:59
Speaker 1: that give rise to larger and larger stuff, you can
34:02
Speaker 1: you can do anything. It's it's weird you can do
34:05
Speaker 1: increasingly sophisticated stuff. The more basic your algorithm is. It's
34:10
Speaker 1: almost a paradox. Yeah, this is like Dr Octagon stuff.
34:16
Speaker 1: Dr Octagon. I don't know, is that right from? Yeah?
34:21
Speaker 1: He was Alfallina? You mean sure? All right? I like
34:27
Speaker 1: Alpha Malina. I think he makes some really weird choices
34:29
Speaker 1: for parts. I'm sure somebody's like, hey, we'll give you
34:34
Speaker 1: ten million dollars to play Doctor Octagon. I'd be like, sure,
34:36
Speaker 1: you got it. Where do I sign up? Yeah? I
34:39
Speaker 1: need to get him a movie crush because he actually
34:41
Speaker 1: is friends of the network. He's a friend of the network.
34:44
Speaker 1: I think he's been on The Daily's Eye Guist a
34:46
Speaker 1: few times, and like they booked him on some other
34:49
Speaker 1: comedy shows. I'm like, guys, they're a little Malina My
34:51
Speaker 1: way for real, Malina spread all over Movie Crush. You've
34:55
Speaker 1: been on daily s Eite guys twice. I've never have.
34:58
Speaker 1: I've been on movie Crush too. Ad Miles on the
35:03
Speaker 1: movie Crush the other day and I was giving my
35:04
Speaker 1: hard time because they haven't asked me on and twice.
35:08
Speaker 1: It's hilarious. Keep it up, chuck. Yeah, he was like,
35:11
Speaker 1: uh no, man, I was like, Miles, did he really
35:15
Speaker 1: you flustered him? I feel like he was on skates
35:17
Speaker 1: for a second here, but I let him off the hook.
35:20
Speaker 1: I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really like
35:22
Speaker 1: going full court press here. Yeah. Miles is like man
35:25
Speaker 1: beat beyond guard, chucked his not pull punches. It's funny
35:29
Speaker 1: because Miles, you know, as you know, is such a smart,
35:32
Speaker 1: smart guy and uh just like having a conversation with
35:36
Speaker 1: him is always amazing. And then he comes on and
35:39
Speaker 1: he picks Mall Rats. What's his favorite movie? Was it? Really?
35:43
Speaker 1: That's his favorite movie of all time? Huh? I mean
35:45
Speaker 1: that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man,
35:46
Speaker 1: I never said I had good tastes. It's pretty fun.
35:49
Speaker 1: Do you have any hints of what Jack's is going
35:51
Speaker 1: to be? Well? I know it's pulp fiction because he
35:55
Speaker 1: he had me save it like two years ago, and
35:57
Speaker 1: I just you know, he kept slipping through the crack.
35:59
Speaker 1: So he's gonna come on next week for pulpiction. All right,
36:03
Speaker 1: So let's get back to I mean, we talked about
36:05
Speaker 1: how the uh, the d D as we're gonna call it,
36:09
Speaker 1: moves around with yeah, without a the pacemaker cells. But
36:14
Speaker 1: that original true slime mold, the big single celled one
36:17
Speaker 1: that's just made up of all the goopy cytoplasm. We
36:20
Speaker 1: didn't really talk about what they do. And because if
36:23
Speaker 1: you don't have cell walls, you're like, well, how's this
36:25
Speaker 1: stuff moving around? It's actually made up of what's called
36:29
Speaker 1: oscillating units. And so these units oscillated different frequencies depending
36:34
Speaker 1: what's going on, like where they are, and then what
36:38
Speaker 1: the their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so
36:42
Speaker 1: when they go close to food, they start oscillating and
36:45
Speaker 1: shaking like hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food, and
36:48
Speaker 1: then that just sort of gets that flow. Everyone else
36:51
Speaker 1: starts oscillating in a similar manner, and that gets that
36:54
Speaker 1: flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction. Yeah, and
36:57
Speaker 1: so the slime mold effectively moves to the food because
37:01
Speaker 1: of that that oscillating unit that looks again like a
37:04
Speaker 1: fan spreading out going to find food and then finding it,
37:08
Speaker 1: the slime mold moves toward it or like you said,
37:11
Speaker 1: away from something that they don't like. Ye yes, um,
37:16
Speaker 1: which is pretty neat. So so those are the two things.
37:18
Speaker 1: It's moving towards food and moving away from something and um.
37:21
Speaker 1: One of the things that they found is that slime
37:24
Speaker 1: old can actually um learn and not only learn to
37:28
Speaker 1: like stay away from something, it can actually teach other
37:32
Speaker 1: slime mold um to stay away from it, even slime
37:35
Speaker 1: mold that's never been introduced to it. Or alternately, it
37:39
Speaker 1: can teach this is the really the thought garter. Uh.
37:43
Speaker 1: In fact, it can teach other slime mold that something
37:47
Speaker 1: that seems harmful is actually harmless. This is a pretty
37:51
Speaker 1: cool experiment. Yeah, So these researchers put slime molds, uh.
37:56
Speaker 1: They built a little tiny bridge, was very cute, and
37:59
Speaker 1: they coded this bridge and a noxious substance. It wasn't
38:04
Speaker 1: harmful to them, it was harmless. It was like salt
38:06
Speaker 1: or something, let's say. And then they put the little
38:09
Speaker 1: those little oat flakes on the other side as their
38:12
Speaker 1: ultimate temptation. And so these first slime olds start creeping
38:16
Speaker 1: up to it and sort of dip in their little
38:19
Speaker 1: toe in the water and saying, uh, this stuff is
38:22
Speaker 1: pretty notious. But then they learned, right, like, okay, so
38:26
Speaker 1: it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.
38:30
Speaker 1: And what they found was that it learned to cross
38:33
Speaker 1: this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that
38:36
Speaker 1: were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on. Right,
38:41
Speaker 1: So it said, Okay, this stuff's fine. It's he's gross,
38:43
Speaker 1: is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me.
38:45
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna get to food just as fast. Right.
38:48
Speaker 1: That's pretty amazing in enough self, but gets crazy, yes, right,
38:52
Speaker 1: they we need like a banner matter nole to come
38:55
Speaker 1: in and say that. Um. So they they take the
38:59
Speaker 1: slime mold and break it apart and fuse it together
39:02
Speaker 1: with other slime molds that have never been exposed to
39:05
Speaker 1: this noxious stuff before. They're called naive and the other
39:09
Speaker 1: ones are called habituated. And those naive ones when they
39:12
Speaker 1: encounter this noxious stuff like a salt bridge for the
39:15
Speaker 1: first time, they don't approach it with trepidation. They go
39:19
Speaker 1: right across it as fast as the habituated ones that
39:22
Speaker 1: it's fused to. This is really weird because this is
39:26
Speaker 1: the first time the stuff is encountering it, and they
39:28
Speaker 1: think that somehow the habituated slime molds are passing on
39:32
Speaker 1: the information like no, no, we know it's gross, but
39:35
Speaker 1: it's actually fine to the naive slime molds. And they
39:39
Speaker 1: figured out, Chuck, that it doesn't matter if you take
39:42
Speaker 1: three habituated slime molds infuse them with one naive slime mold,
39:47
Speaker 1: or take three naive slime molds and one just one
39:50
Speaker 1: habituated slime mold. It's going to approach us and move
39:53
Speaker 1: across it just as fast as as either in either situation. Yeah,
39:58
Speaker 1: and then they also sort of figured out how long
40:01
Speaker 1: this took. So the naive slime molds they separated after
40:05
Speaker 1: an hour of fusion with those uh habituated I'm gonna
40:09
Speaker 1: call them in the no molds, and it forgot. It
40:13
Speaker 1: forgot that the coding was harmless and it sort of
40:16
Speaker 1: had to approach it with a little more trepidation. But
40:19
Speaker 1: if they had been fused for three hours or more
40:21
Speaker 1: and then separated it, it remembered. I mean it technically
40:27
Speaker 1: can't remember, but they do have this weird sort of
40:30
Speaker 1: memory uh that works. And I think they even figured
40:34
Speaker 1: out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave
40:37
Speaker 1: behind access sort of like a spatial memory, because they
40:40
Speaker 1: come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already
40:44
Speaker 1: been here before me, right, so there's no reason to
40:47
Speaker 1: go research this area because clearly wasn't food there. Yeah,
40:52
Speaker 1: and again here's your ten minute reminder that slime mold
40:55
Speaker 1: don't have brains or neuron So all of this is
40:58
Speaker 1: just just astounding stuff that we're still trying to get
41:02
Speaker 1: to the bottom up, like that habituation thing. They're like,
41:04
Speaker 1: we don't know, we have no idea, but we're gonna
41:06
Speaker 1: go find out and maybe in ten years we'll be
41:08
Speaker 1: able to explain it. Right, So eventually, um, you know,
41:14
Speaker 1: the people that are people that are hipped to the
41:17
Speaker 1: slime mold mold thing are like trying to spread them that.
41:21
Speaker 1: They're trying to spread the word and me, like, this
41:23
Speaker 1: stuff is really amazing. They're doing Ted talks on it. It
41:25
Speaker 1: It was a really good Ted talk on it, in fact,
41:27
Speaker 1: and some coders said, hey, wait a minute, you know
41:32
Speaker 1: they're doing all this amazing stuff like the overlay of
41:34
Speaker 1: the Tokyo subway and it's lining up perfectly. What if
41:38
Speaker 1: we actually generated code of the slime mold and kind
41:42
Speaker 1: of reverse engineered it and and we could see what
41:45
Speaker 1: that look like and how we could use it. So yeah,
41:49
Speaker 1: this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured out um
41:55
Speaker 1: or took. I don't know exactly who figured out exactly
41:58
Speaker 1: what the the slime mole old um algorithms were, but
42:02
Speaker 1: somebody wrote them down and Sage Jensen came along and
42:05
Speaker 1: turned them into a C plus plus code and basically
42:09
Speaker 1: ran these things it's like algorithms, and found that these
42:14
Speaker 1: fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold,
42:18
Speaker 1: moving across the peat tradition search of food, which is
42:21
Speaker 1: pretty cool in and of itself. It was art art
42:24
Speaker 1: project basically, but some someone on a team of astrophysicists
42:29
Speaker 1: heard about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when
42:32
Speaker 1: they were stumped trying to figure out how to map
42:38
Speaker 1: them the invisible matter that makes up basically the structure
42:42
Speaker 1: of our universe, that that if we can just crack
42:45
Speaker 1: that nut, will understand the universe exponentially better than we
42:49
Speaker 1: do now, but we cannot figure out how to do it.
42:53
Speaker 1: And so, just like with the ancient roads between the
42:56
Speaker 1: Roman cities or the Tokyo subway map, someone figured it
43:00
Speaker 1: out to use slime mold to basically try to try
43:04
Speaker 1: to create the structure of the universe that's invisible. These
43:07
Speaker 1: invisible filaments. Yeah, these filaments that came out of the
43:10
Speaker 1: Big Bang. So I guess they went back to Sage
43:13
Speaker 1: Jensen and said, uh, first of all, stage U C
43:17
Speaker 1: plus plus code, isn't there really just be minus code?
43:19
Speaker 1: For being honest? And he said, that's not how it works.
43:22
Speaker 1: Get out of most great coding joke. Uh, thank you.
43:27
Speaker 1: It's my only coding joke. And I just made it
43:30
Speaker 1: the only coding joke I think. No, I think it's
43:33
Speaker 1: not a bug. It's a feature, isn't that one's? Um?
43:38
Speaker 1: So yeah, they went to Sage and they said, you're
43:43
Speaker 1: an artist, but this is pretty amazing. I think we
43:45
Speaker 1: can apply it here, and they modified it and what
43:49
Speaker 1: they did was and of course there's always oats involved. Um,
43:53
Speaker 1: they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells,
43:56
Speaker 1: and they put it on a map with thirty seven
43:58
Speaker 1: thousand real galaxy and they used I guess virtual piles
44:04
Speaker 1: of food to represent the galaxies, and the bigger the galaxy,
44:08
Speaker 1: the bigger the pile of food. And so they did
44:11
Speaker 1: this modeling through the coating and had the virtual slime
44:14
Speaker 1: olds seek out the most efficient way to reach this,
44:18
Speaker 1: and I guess in theory they're hoping that they get
44:21
Speaker 1: a sort of map of the universe out of it. Yeah.
44:24
Speaker 1: So so when the slime hold was finished, they all
44:27
Speaker 1: stood background, that's amazing, How accurate is it? And they
44:31
Speaker 1: all just realized that they had no idea how but no, surely,
44:36
Speaker 1: Like I think what they're doing is they're taking this
44:38
Speaker 1: as an initial, you know, guide, and then they'll go
44:41
Speaker 1: back and try to figure out how to verify it.
44:44
Speaker 1: And maybe the slime old did figure out the most
44:46
Speaker 1: efficient way to link together these galaxies, but that would
44:50
Speaker 1: be I can't even put a word on that of
44:54
Speaker 1: what that would how impressive that would be if the
44:56
Speaker 1: slime mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together,
45:01
Speaker 1: the structure of it. You know, what if slim old
45:04
Speaker 1: does God? What if we your sleep right now and
45:07
Speaker 1: this is all just one dream? Chuck? Uh? The other
45:10
Speaker 1: cool thing they figured out with the slim old moving
45:12
Speaker 1: around is when they were researching them, they found that
45:16
Speaker 1: they those mazes that they were running them through, they
45:19
Speaker 1: went even faster through the maze when they had some
45:21
Speaker 1: sort of noise like a bright light or something like
45:24
Speaker 1: we said. They like to go away from things they
45:25
Speaker 1: don't like, and that negative input of that light basically
45:30
Speaker 1: made them say, all right, let's let's pick up the
45:32
Speaker 1: pace and make make these decisions quicker and get to
45:35
Speaker 1: that food and stop fussing around. I don't like this
45:38
Speaker 1: light staring at me. I think we kind of blew
45:40
Speaker 1: some minds today. I think so. My mind's definitely been blown.
45:44
Speaker 1: Did you want to cover the Amazon thing? Nope? Okay, good.
45:49
Speaker 1: Uh that's it for slim unless you've got anything else
45:52
Speaker 1: right now? Do you? I got nothing else. We'll have
45:54
Speaker 1: to revisit this in ten years. And thanks to Dave
45:56
Speaker 1: Ruse for helping us with this one. Um. And since
45:59
Speaker 1: I to Dave Rouse, I think chuck it means it's
46:02
Speaker 1: time for a listener mail. Hey guys, I'm gonna call
46:07
Speaker 1: this night trap response. I just laugh every time I
46:12
Speaker 1: hear those words together. Now, No night trap. This is
46:15
Speaker 1: from Aaron, Hey, guys, just finish the Night Trap video
46:17
Speaker 1: Game show. Thanks for bringing it to everyone. I own
46:19
Speaker 1: the twenty five anniversary edition. Like you said, it's not
46:22
Speaker 1: a good game, but has its moments. One other game
46:25
Speaker 1: worth noting is called Double Switch. It said the same
46:28
Speaker 1: style and video camera control quality, and it started Corey Hame.
46:32
Speaker 1: Perhaps arguably a little better game, but still had the
46:36
Speaker 1: same thing going on. Really, I'm sure your research and
46:39
Speaker 1: its lots of things that don't quite make it into
46:40
Speaker 1: the final show. Uh, Aaron, we did not know about
46:43
Speaker 1: Double Switch, So nice work there. And Aaron says, I've
46:46
Speaker 1: listened to so many shows it feel bit Chuck and
46:48
Speaker 1: I are some sort of long lost brothers separated at birth.
46:51
Speaker 1: Generally agree with just about everything he says, and I'm
46:53
Speaker 1: always fully entertained. It would be nice to meet you
46:55
Speaker 1: guys if you ever get another tour started and make
46:58
Speaker 1: it back to Michigan. Keep up the good work. I
47:01
Speaker 1: finish your book, and I have the pre order poster
47:04
Speaker 1: in my office and I've converted friends and family. So
47:07
Speaker 1: that is from Aaron in Michigan. And we're definitely gonna
47:11
Speaker 1: start touring again. I would say probably next year, although
47:14
Speaker 1: we haven't really talked much about it, no, but we
47:18
Speaker 1: need to. It's definitely starting to get to be time
47:20
Speaker 1: to to get talking, I guess, although I gotta admit
47:24
Speaker 1: I have not missed the traveling. I've missed being on stage,
47:26
Speaker 1: but not the traveling part. Well, you know that's what
47:29
Speaker 1: they say, that's what rock stars say. It's not the heat,
47:32
Speaker 1: it's the humidity. Now they say that. You know, you
47:36
Speaker 1: get paid to travel, you don't get paid to play shows.
47:40
Speaker 1: I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense. Yeah,
47:44
Speaker 1: if you can figure out how to get paid for both,
47:45
Speaker 1: then you're really really doing something right. Good stuff. Yeah,
47:50
Speaker 1: and if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit.
47:53
Speaker 1: We've had a lot of calls over here for ann Arbor,
47:54
Speaker 1: so maybe that's where we go. Yes, um, well who
47:59
Speaker 1: is that again? Aaron? Aaron? That's what I was gonna guess.
48:02
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Aaron. That was a great email. Thanks
48:04
Speaker 1: for the Corey Hame reference and all that stuff. And
48:07
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, like
48:08
Speaker 1: Aaron did, you can send us an email to Stuff
48:11
Speaker 1: Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know
48:17
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts
48:20
Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
48:24
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.