Sentences with phrase «slime moulds»
Slime moulds are living organisms that belong to the fungus kingdom. They are unique because they can move and change shape, unlike other fungi. Slime moulds often look like brightly colored blobs or slimy substances found in nature. They are important for the ecosystem as they help in breaking down dead organic matter. Full definition
Many different species of slime mould may live in the same place.
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Yellow slime mould is known to follow traces of sweetness to locate food.
The distraction of an extra choice, no matter how poor, apparently serves to diminish the overall decision - making process for slime mould and investor alike.
Tanya Latty & Madeleine Beekman (2010) Speed — accuracy trade - offs during foraging decisions in the acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B.
Resnick simulated the aggregation of slime mould cells in a computer model (LL 232 - 233).
When I read about the experiment in which slime mould spread patterns were shown to mimic road networks in the...
Spores of slime moulds on germination produce amoeba - like cells.
Lastly, my most recent model organism is a weird one: an acellular slime mould.
Watch in terror as slime mould overruns Tokyo.
Erica Tennenhouse describes snails, starfish and slime moulds learning without brains (15 July, p 32).
Understanding how things like slime moulds and plants can learn without a brain or even any neurons could help us fight diseases and make smarter machines
In their search for a vaccine against a group of viruses which commonly causes gastroenteritis, Keith Williams, a biologist and head of the Macquarie University Centre for Analytical Biotechnology in Sydney, has turned to the humble slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum to grow the genetic material.
Single cellular slime moulds are very different from ants but the way they solve problems is remarkably similar.
«Force in this sense refers to the gravity that exerts an influence on all things that exist in a space, the force that allows vegetation to grow up from the ground, and the force that enables slime mould to creep along a wall,» Nawa writes.
Bringing together slime moulds, submarine creatures and migrating birds, the show looks at «processes of emergence of non-neuronal and expanded forms of intelligence, both in nature and technology» and features work by Joey Holder, Anna Mikkola and Jenna Sutela.
After three days, the scientists harvest billions of slime mould cells, each containing rotavirus protein.
We know that chemical gradients are involved in the ordering of the building of a termite nest and in the life history of slime moulds.
A notable example is the slime moulds that live in soil.
Each individual entity, be it a proton, a protein molecule, an amoeba of a slime mould or an ant in an army raid can be regarded in the Whiteheadian scheme as being what it is largely by virtue of its internal relations to its environment, be those components of environment temperature for a snowflake, acrasin for an amoeba or a neighbor ant for another ant.
Now it seems that slime mould can make similarly complex decisions — despite being just a giant super-cell.
What connects human intelligence to the unsung cunning of slime moulds?
A DECADE ago, researchers showed that slime moulds could solve a maze.
Her team is also exploring whether, in addition to number - crunching, slime mould's knack for finding the shortest path to nutrients can be used to design the most efficient circuit patterns for biocomputers.
The feeding fronds of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum turn out to have memory resistance — or memristance.
«Slime mould can be used to perform all the logic functions that conventional computer hardware components can do,» says Gale.
A minor celebrity in philosophical circles, slime moulds are neither unicellular nor multicellular, but something in between.
The Plasmodium Consortium at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, is a policy research institute composed of «visiting non-human scholars» — members of the species Physarum polycephalum, one of the more common types of slime mould.
Hirokazu Tanimoto and Masaki Sano at the University of Tokyo, Japan, studied what happens during the division of Dictyostelium — a slime mould that has barely changed through eons of evolution.
Take a slime mould.
Really, this manifestation is just one stage in the slime mould's life, formed when many single cells, each with their own distinct DNA, mingle and fuse.
In nature, a slime mould relies on chemical receptors on its surface to sense substances in its path as it creeps along the forest floor.
Brasier thinks Maloof's find is «exciting», but cautions that the structures could equally belong to giant single - celled organisms and slime moulds.
Eduardo Miranda, a composer and researcher in artificial intelligence at the University of Plymouth, has created a slime mould accompanist.
He's now working on a feedback mechanism to turn audio signals into light, allowing the slime mould to «hear» what its fellow musicians are playing, and will premiere a piece next year written for an ensemble of slime mould and traditional instruments.
Neither are fungi, diatoms, nematodes, tardigrades, slime moulds, algae or most other species on the planet.
The proteins are removed from the slime mould with a detergent which eats away the cell membrane.
Slime moulds, strange organisms which have characteristics of both plants and animals, could help researchers to grow the genetic material needed to produce new vaccines.
«First the bacteria grow and eat the nutrients, and then the slime moulds come up behind and eat the bacteria.»
The cells of slime moulds, however, are more like animal cells in that their walls are less defined than plants; yet they also reproduce using spores, like plants.
From every litre of nutrient, slime mould and bacteria, the team obtains 50 grams of slime mould cells — ten times the number of cells that can be grown from a litre of animal cell starter.
A rotavirus gene is inserted into a slime mould plasmid.
The plasmid is incubated overnight and then placed in a tray spread with a nutrient, agar, mixed with E. coli bacteria to feed the slime mould.
Plasmids are free - floating rings of DNA present in bacteria and slime moulds.
Australian researchers have managed to grow genetic material in a slime mould six times faster than they can clone the genes by conventional methods.
The slime mould Physarum polycephalum consists of a network of tubes which shuttle nutrient around.
This slime mould is a protist that we are developing as a model organism to understand the evolution of decision - making.
The slime mould spreads out and connects all the food sources; then it contracts to the minimal path between them.
Through this process the slime mould is able to build a network that efficiently connects large numbers of food sources.
To exemplify this we challenged the slime mould to build a network connecting the suburbs in a food - map of Tokyo (see YouTube video below: Credit: Dr. Seiji Takagi, Hokkaido University).
We have shown that this same mechanism allows the slime mould to balance its nutrient intake, make rational and sometimes irrational choices and trade - off between speed and accuracy requirements.