Ian's Posts - The Slime Mould Collective2024-03-29T13:14:51Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ianhttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/985930005?profile=original&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://slimoco.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=1woz5qqkltciq&xn_auth=noRaising from Spores - Zero Tech Methodtag:slimoco.ning.com,2017-04-11:3917201:BlogPost:339052017-04-11T13:30:00.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>I've been looking for a way to rear physarum from spores without resorting to bacterial lawns and needing autoclaves etc.</p>
<p>I've only done a couple of trials but this method seems to work ok, it does require a bit of patience.</p>
<p>I used petri dishes and filter paper but any container and a bit of tissue should work.</p>
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<p>The idea is to let the food go off producing bacteria for the amoebal phase to feed off then slowly dry them out so they get persuaded to form…</p>
<p>I've been looking for a way to rear physarum from spores without resorting to bacterial lawns and needing autoclaves etc.</p>
<p>I've only done a couple of trials but this method seems to work ok, it does require a bit of patience.</p>
<p>I used petri dishes and filter paper but any container and a bit of tissue should work.</p>
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<p>The idea is to let the food go off producing bacteria for the amoebal phase to feed off then slowly dry them out so they get persuaded to form plasmodia.</p>
<p>Your spores need to be a few weeks old and well dried. If you don't know how to raise spores from physarum, just leave one in the light with no food for a week or so. Once it starts to bunch up and go dark, take the lid off and let it dry.</p>
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<p>Put a piece of absorbent paper in a container and wet it with tap water - enough to leave a visible film of water over the paper.</p>
<p>Sprinkle on a few physarum spores and a pinch of oats - not sterilised, not cooked, just rolled oats.</p>
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<p>Leave everything in the dark and forget about it.</p>
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<p>After two weeks it should look awful, the oats will have broken down into a horrible mess and you will have pin mold and other delights growing. Add a few more oats ( not many ), dampen a little if needed.</p>
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<p>After another week, loosen the lid - if you're using a vented petri it may dry enough anyway. You want the paper slowly dry until it's just damp. Leave it a few more days slightly damp.</p>
<p>Checking with a microscope at x30 or a 10x hand lens should show a few tiny spots of yellow mucous - as the oats will be discoloured and gooey they will be hard to spot but you're looking for them on the paper close to oats. When you find one, give it a single oat flake and a drop of water, leave them around 2 days and they should move over to the oat. Transplant them to fresh paper and use oats to coax them away from the festering remnants of the original substrate.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404818318?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404818318?profile=RESIZE_480x480" class="align-left" height="464" width="460"></a><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404818893?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404818893?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" class="align-right" width="500"></a></p>Big bang, big disappointment :)tag:slimoco.ning.com,2016-03-16:3917201:BlogPost:295332016-03-16T17:04:23.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Four weeks of crazy work, turning the spare room into a culture lab and time lapse studio I made enough culture for two thousand people and I should be there with my friends and colleagues on the stand inspiring the next generation of scientists, slime fans and eccentrics. </p>
<p>Unfortunately I'm stuck on a hospital ward with fifty stitches in my neck waiting until I'm allowed home. So it goes I suppose but damn I was looking forward to the Big Bang Fair, I couldn't even bring a slime…</p>
<p>Four weeks of crazy work, turning the spare room into a culture lab and time lapse studio I made enough culture for two thousand people and I should be there with my friends and colleagues on the stand inspiring the next generation of scientists, slime fans and eccentrics. </p>
<p>Unfortunately I'm stuck on a hospital ward with fifty stitches in my neck waiting until I'm allowed home. So it goes I suppose but damn I was looking forward to the Big Bang Fair, I couldn't even bring a slime into hospital :(</p>
<p>The experience has reawakened my enthusiasm for playing with physarum though - bigger and better maps, food choice plates and weird experiments are in the planning. I set up spare cultures before I came ( gotta get your priorities right when you need prompt surgery ;)) so if they don't let me out soon there will be more escapes... </p>Plotting and planning....tag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-06-02:3917201:BlogPost:245702015-06-02T11:31:09.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Getting involved with several schools in my area running STEM club activities - I'm trying to design a six week course on our dear sticky friend that'll be adaptable to ages 12-17. Looks like it'll be fun ( and a lot of work ). My own cultures have been dormant for a while aside from raising the odd batch but I should start playing again soon. </p>
<p>Getting involved with several schools in my area running STEM club activities - I'm trying to design a six week course on our dear sticky friend that'll be adaptable to ages 12-17. Looks like it'll be fun ( and a lot of work ). My own cultures have been dormant for a while aside from raising the odd batch but I should start playing again soon. </p>Raising slime again..tag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-05-18:3917201:BlogPost:243102015-05-18T14:17:54.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Blimey it's been a while, we've got the finals lab projects for the students at work on at the moment so I'm not getting time to play. I've got a session with 95 school kids booked in in June so I'm raising as much slime as I can cope with in preparation for that. </p>
<p>I'm planning on getting them to make Plasticine mazes in petri dishes for their cultures so they've something to take home.</p>
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<p>I've also got these intriguing mycena cholorophos spores ( a glowing mushroom ),…</p>
<p>Blimey it's been a while, we've got the finals lab projects for the students at work on at the moment so I'm not getting time to play. I've got a session with 95 school kids booked in in June so I'm raising as much slime as I can cope with in preparation for that. </p>
<p>I'm planning on getting them to make Plasticine mazes in petri dishes for their cultures so they've something to take home.</p>
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<p>I've also got these intriguing mycena cholorophos spores ( a glowing mushroom ), I've read enough papers to know how best to grow them, I just need the lab a bit quieter.......</p>
<p></p>Distracted but plodding awaytag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-04-22:3917201:BlogPost:240362015-04-22T08:00:00.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Having builders round with the tendency to turn off the electric several times a day has slowed me down a bit - I can't shoot timelapse so I've been working away at the 250gb of images so far adding zooms and pans to the footage. Catching spore formation still eludes me but I've hit the science journals and found out that niacin encourages spore formation so I might be spending the weekend painting rotting bits of wood with it. </p>
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<p>I've had a short film maker approach me over the…</p>
<p>Having builders round with the tendency to turn off the electric several times a day has slowed me down a bit - I can't shoot timelapse so I've been working away at the 250gb of images so far adding zooms and pans to the footage. Catching spore formation still eludes me but I've hit the science journals and found out that niacin encourages spore formation so I might be spending the weekend painting rotting bits of wood with it. </p>
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<p>I've had a short film maker approach me over the teaser footage as they want to use some in their next production. There's no money in it but if I was in it for the money I'd be filming entirely different subjects. </p>
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<p>Further distraction now added by the sudden and long awaited appearance of two bee colonies over the weekend :) </p>
<p>You can read about those here:</p>
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<p><a href="https://thenakedapiarist.wordpress.com/">https://thenakedapiarist.wordpress.com/</a></p>
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<p></p>I'm starting to dream about slime mould, maybe I should go for a blood test - perhaps it's infected metag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-04-13:3917201:BlogPost:242022015-04-13T08:11:37.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>One aspect of the physarum life cycle is still evading the cameras - Spore formation. Normally I don't have a problem making spores but putting the organism in a natural(ish) setting and pointing multiple cameras at it seems to make it misbehave. I might have to rethink the setup to improve my chances - hard drives are getting very full now as the number of stills hits nearly 200gb. </p>
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<p>This means I have actually taken more photos of physarum than any other subject and I'm not…</p>
<p>One aspect of the physarum life cycle is still evading the cameras - Spore formation. Normally I don't have a problem making spores but putting the organism in a natural(ish) setting and pointing multiple cameras at it seems to make it misbehave. I might have to rethink the setup to improve my chances - hard drives are getting very full now as the number of stills hits nearly 200gb. </p>
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<p>This means I have actually taken more photos of physarum than any other subject and I'm not too far off having more photos of physarum than all other photos combined.</p>
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<p>I'm starting to dream about slime mould, maybe I should go for a blood test - perhaps it's infected me</p>100gb and countingtag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-04-08:3917201:BlogPost:237102015-04-08T12:01:16.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Two cameras, and four days of shooting at 20 second intervals leads to an awful lot disc space taken up. So far I've just done a rough render - take the whole damned lot and turn it into one movie file. Now I can see the massive deficiency in using the study rather than the workshop for shooting - every time I tread on a floorboard the camera moves. </p>
<p>Easy to fix by tracking a couple of points in the images but tedious and slow. </p>
<p>The huge advantage of using something like an SLR…</p>
<p>Two cameras, and four days of shooting at 20 second intervals leads to an awful lot disc space taken up. So far I've just done a rough render - take the whole damned lot and turn it into one movie file. Now I can see the massive deficiency in using the study rather than the workshop for shooting - every time I tread on a floorboard the camera moves. </p>
<p>Easy to fix by tracking a couple of points in the images but tedious and slow. </p>
<p>The huge advantage of using something like an SLR to shoot time lapse is the frames are around 5000 pixels across, HS is just 1920x1080 so I have a choice of scaling the image to fit or zooming in on one spot and having the freedom to pan around within the shot.</p>
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<p>I've about 20 mins of footage. I need to do something more interesting that just a video of physarum but I shall put up a preview soon</p>
<p></p>A new hope...tag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-04-03:3917201:BlogPost:235412015-04-03T19:45:41.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>I've been shooting time lapses all week - all in Petri dishes and all of them have messed up due to condensation so I'm trying something different.</p>
<p>Somewhere in this box, amongst the moss I meant to add and the slugs, spiders and mites that just came along for the ride is a load of . </p>
<p>The base is a paint tray full of potting compost packed down hard two large colonies of physarum on paper covered with moss, rotting wood and grass seedlings. I'm…</p>
<p>I've been shooting time lapses all week - all in Petri dishes and all of them have messed up due to condensation so I'm trying something different.</p>
<p>Somewhere in this box, amongst the moss I meant to add and the slugs, spiders and mites that just came along for the ride is a load of . </p>
<p>The base is a paint tray full of potting compost packed down hard two large colonies of physarum on paper covered with moss, rotting wood and grass seedlings. I'm hoping after a day in the dark my slimy friend will explore and tomorrow I can bring it into the light and film spore formation<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404813682?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/404813682?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"></a></p>Having a series of failed experiments heretag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-03-31:3917201:BlogPost:232872015-03-31T18:19:27.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>but then, it wouldn't be proper science if it worked straight off. Back to the soldering iron, or the gin and tonic.</p>
<p>but then, it wouldn't be proper science if it worked straight off. Back to the soldering iron, or the gin and tonic.</p>Toys....tag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-03-26:3917201:BlogPost:234512015-03-26T20:30:03.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>Just arrived, a USB sound card, an op amp, several jack plugs and a spool of platinum wire. Slime, you're gonna get probed :-) </p>
<p>Just arrived, a USB sound card, an op amp, several jack plugs and a spool of platinum wire. Slime, you're gonna get probed :-) </p>Why slime?tag:slimoco.ning.com,2015-03-26:3917201:BlogPost:235122015-03-26T20:27:45.000Zianhttp://slimoco.ning.com/profile/ian
<p>I started getting into Physarum last year - I've worked with the cellular slime mold dictyostelium before and I was asked to prepare some slime mold time lapse footage for some public lectures. Seeing as we'd finished the dicty work and they're quite dull I decided to get a more entertaining organism. Once I'd finished the film footage I'd grown quite fond of them and started keeping a culture or two going in the lab, and then at home.</p>
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<p>I work with microscopes- my day job…</p>
<p>I started getting into Physarum last year - I've worked with the cellular slime mold dictyostelium before and I was asked to prepare some slime mold time lapse footage for some public lectures. Seeing as we'd finished the dicty work and they're quite dull I decided to get a more entertaining organism. Once I'd finished the film footage I'd grown quite fond of them and started keeping a culture or two going in the lab, and then at home.</p>
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<p>I work with microscopes- my day job involves running them, training people on them and swearing at them when they misbehave, Physarum turns out to be a great thing to have around, far more interesting than a standard test slide and more entertaining to teach microscopy with because of its tendency to move around and to obligingly eat the fluorescent dyes I offer it. </p>
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<p>I also do a lot of work with science communication and outreach, particularly with schools and Physarum is great as a macroscopic microscopic organism - it exhibits chemotaxis, phototaxis and as an added bonus solves mazes and escapes from perti dishes - all without the need for sterile conditions. It's my firm intention to become a slime evangelist and ensure that every school in the surround area gets covered in a yellow network of pulsating tubules. </p>