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

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