Sentences with phrase «slime molds»

"Slime molds" refer to a type of fungus-like organism that is not quite a plant or an animal. They often live in moist environments, like forests or decaying leaves. They are called "slime molds" because they have a slimy or gooey appearance, and they sometimes form a blob-like shape. They play an important role in nature by helping to break down dead plants and organic matter. Full definition
Other collective organisms such as slime molds must contend with evolutionary pressures both on the whole and on individuals.
There are people who make fun of basic, and apparently pointless, research — things like figuring out how slime mold moves around.
For many biologists, slime molds provide simple models for studying cell development and mobility.
In this film scientists use time - lapse video to figure out how slime molds make those decisions.
Geneticist Adam Rutherford traces Calvin's petri - dish incarnation to Dictyostelium, a real - world genus of slime mold with individual cells that grow into interesting - looking three - dimensional structures.
That is not too hard to take, because few of us encounter slime molds with any regularity.
Single - celled slime molds demonstrate the ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events, a team of Japanese researchers reported in January.
The cyber moth joins the esteemed ranks of simple organisms hitched to robots, including slime mold, a detached eel brain and the cockroach.
rumsfeldi are beetles, named by Republican bug - hugger fanboys who did not think about the fact these beetles eat slime mold.
If these beetles do primarily feed on slime mold, I'd say the taxonomist that named them really did think about the etymology of the binomen before naming them.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Steven Johnson (Scribner) An Internet visionary reveals what slime molds and software developers have in common.
New research shows how a social slime mold species seeds its own food, giving ants, termites and other fungal harvesters steep competition for surprising agriculture adaptations
For the morning glory that spreads its petals at dawn, for geese flying south in autumn, for locusts swarming every 17 years and even for lowly slime molds sporing in daily cycles, timing is everything.
A wry Londoner with a brush mustache, he was used to spending most of his time researching fungi, bacteria, and the evolutionary relationships among slime molds.
Clockwise from mushroom at bottom: Amanita muscaria, giant panda, Desmarella, Euglena, Giardia, Trichomonas, star sand foram, Allogromia foram, Globigerina foram, Colpidium ciliates, Stentor, dinoflagellate, Coscinodiscus, Stephanodiscus, giant kelp, Gephyrocapsa, Ceratolithus, Phaeocystis, Magnolia, Galaxaura red seaweed, Scenedesmus green algae, Entamoeba, Tubulifera slime mold, Chaos amoeba.
Sometimes these collectives are fixed, like a cluster of barnacles on a ship's hull; other times they move, or swarm, like miniature slime molds.
The extension to a much larger network of slime mold tubes could process nanoparticles and carry out sophisticated Boolean logic operations of the kind used by computer circuitry.
But The Creeping Garden becomes needlessly gloomy whenever the filmmakers aren't exploring slime mold's role in scientific progress, such as the handful of sequences featuring amateur scientist Mark Pragnell searching a forest for the organism.
When I spoke with its director / co - star / co-writer Benjamin Dickinson and co-star comedian / philosopher / rapper Reggie Watts on February 26, 2016, I should not have been surprised that conversation would eventually turn from the eternal struggle between art and commerce, to speculation about the reality of space spores and the taxonomic classification slime molds (neither slime, nor mold).
Additionally from the narration paints the film as an exploration of the delicacy of both life - sustaining systems in space, and interpersonal relationships as the characters are faced with colliding satellites, extra-terrestrial slime mold and fear of the unknown.
THE CREEPING GARDEN is a feature length creative documentary exploring the work of fringe scientists, mycologists, and artists — and their relationship with the extraordinary plasmodial slime mold.
Her work includes xenofemme sci - fi / fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe - spanning sentient slime molds.
(Well, slime mold too, but that's another story.)
(Note: Dog vomit slime mold is a type of fungus.
plasmodium A form within the life cycle of some simple organisms such as slime molds, typically consisting of a mass of naked protoplasm containing many nuclei.
This project involves culturing Physarum polycephalum, a type of slime mold that exhibits primitive intelligence, and then seeing if it can find the shortest route between two food sources placed in a maze.
Ecologist Simon Levin discusses his work, including the study of how cooperation is achieved in slime molds, bacterial films and small societies in nature
Five years ago, he got the idea to test whether a particular type of one - celled slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, could navigate through a maze.
Bik said an unexpected and interesting finding was the previously undiscovered association between nematodes and several parasites, including slime molds that have been reported as parasites of other marine invertebrates.
Are you worried, at all, that you will be reincarnated according to the Hindu religion, you haven't live according to their precepts so you'll come back as slime mold?
Sam: I thought pedophiles and necrophiles like yourself would avoid serious discussions:) Your Mama was a slime Mold and Yo» Daddy was a Tree.
They are often grouped in the kingdom Protista together with the plant - like algae and fungus - like water molds and slime molds.
Naturally occurring chimeras are far less ominous though, and include such creatures as the slime mold and corals.
Prize - winning microviews of everything from mouse retinas to slime mold: Click here to launch the image gallery
Inclusive fitness «really changed the kind of data that field biologists who are interested in social traits were collecting,» says his colleague Joan Strassmann, who studies how inclusive fitness governs the behavior of slime molds.
Slime mold might not seem like a terribly advanced life form, but these single - celled social amoebae are adept at joining forces to increase their chances of passing on their genes.
There seem to have been many earlier branchings from the eukaryotic stem, all represented by unicellular eukaryotes (such as the slime molds, the flagellates, the trichomonads, the diplomonads, the microsporidia, among others).
Slime molds, brainless amoebalike organisms that live in forests and plant beds, aren't likely to win the Nobel Prize.
One of the things that grows on the rotting blades is a slime mold that in the 1980s laid waste to vast beds of turtle grass in Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum exists in more than 700 mating types, though not all of them are sexually compatible.
After working with the slime mold for years, he had a hunch that «Physarum could be cleverer than expected.»
This is one of the first times that scientists have found simple, genetically similar organisms that communicate across long distances — yeast and slime mold, in contrast, require direct contact.
The evolution of a distinct germ line that is protected by the diverse somatic functions of the organism is thought to confer an evolutionary advantage — what we call a fitness benefit — to multicellular organisms, whether plant or animal or slime mold.
At the conference, biologists who work mostly in the field observing the behaviors of bees, ants, wolves, slime molds and other creatures tended to look for the mechanics of natural selection at the behavioral level by examining how individual organisms self - organize into hives, nests, packs, conglomerates or families.
The Dicty cells were taken from the single - celled organisms that make up slime molds, whereas the HL60 cells are highly studied human cancer cells.
A large part of Gray's pioneering research has focused on tracing the evolutionary history of mitochondrial genomes in some of the most humble forms of life around: protozoans, slime molds, and certain types of algae.
Slime molds have no brains, yet they make complex decisions.
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