The Slime Mould Collective

An international network of/for intelligent organisms

All Blog Posts (120)

Culturing Slime

Tomorrow I will be starting to culture my slime and I'm a bit new to the whole process. We aim to culture slime both on minimal media and oatmeal agar so how should I go about culturing? E.g. How much of the sclerotia should I be adding to each plate initially?

Thanks

Added by Matt Jackson on August 10, 2015 at 9:59 — No Comments

Need slime in Switzerland

Hello, can anyone send me some live physarium polycephalum to switzerland....will pay for shipping cost.
Or if anyone knows where to get it fast commercial pls tell me. Thanks Nikolai

Added by nikolai on August 8, 2015 at 8:00 — 1 Comment

Need slime in Switzerland

Hello, can anyone send me some live physarium polycephalum to switzerland....will pay for shipping cost.
Or if anyone knows where to get it fast commercial pls tell me. Thanks Nikolai

Added by nikolai on August 8, 2015 at 8:00 — No Comments

Need slime in Switzerland :)

Hello, can anyone send me some live physarium polycephalum to switzerland....will pay for shipping cost.
Or if anyone knows where to get it fast commercial pls tell me. Thanks Nikolai

Added by nikolai on August 8, 2015 at 8:00 — No Comments

Nutrient agar

Hi there!

Anybody know where I could find some nutrient agar in canada? I would like to make some tests to set up an artistic installation...

Thanks!

Added by Ophélie Queffurus on August 2, 2015 at 22:08 — 5 Comments

Fan and Tubular Growth Promotion

Hi everyone,

I am looking to promote tubular and fan like growth in Physarum Polycephalum in 2 separate dishes (1 with tubes, the other with fans). I think to promote tubular growth, I will have a medium with low nutrient content in a petri dish scattered with porridge oats or something like that (any recommendations for this medium?). However what kind of medium could be evenly distributed across a dish that would promote the alternative fan like growth of the slime mould? Could it just…

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Added by Matt Jackson on June 18, 2015 at 15:11 — No Comments

Where to find a slime mould

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to carry out a research project at school involving Physarum Polycephalum and have decided to go out and find my own. Having looked at several sources, the web says that they are retrievable from damp conditions in woodland areas e.g. damp wood, rotting vegetation. Can anyone tell me any other places where they could be hiding?
Thanks

Added by Matt Jackson on June 10, 2015 at 20:26 — 4 Comments

Anyone got live culture in London - needed urgently

I have a workshop this Thursday and my order of live culture has gone missing in the mail. Help!

Does anyone have any live culture they could spare in London to collect tonight or tomorrow?

Let me know if you can help..

Many thanks,

Heather

Added by Heather Barnett on June 9, 2015 at 16:27 — 9 Comments

Plotting and planning....

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. 

Added by ian on June 2, 2015 at 11:31 — No Comments

Raising slime again..

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. 

I'm planning on getting them to make Plasticine mazes in petri dishes for their cultures so they've something to take home.

I've also got these intriguing mycena cholorophos spores ( a glowing mushroom ),…

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Added by ian on May 18, 2015 at 14:17 — No Comments

Distracted but plodding away

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. 

I've had a short film maker approach me over the…

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Added by ian on April 22, 2015 at 8:00 — No Comments

I'm starting to dream about slime mould, maybe I should go for a blood test - perhaps it's infected me

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. 

This means I have actually taken more photos of physarum than any other subject and I'm not…

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Added by ian on April 13, 2015 at 8:11 — 1 Comment

100gb and counting

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. 

Easy to fix by tracking a couple of points in the images but tedious and slow. 

The huge advantage of using something like an SLR…

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Added by ian on April 8, 2015 at 12:01 — No Comments

A new hope...

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.

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 . 

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…

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Added by ian on April 3, 2015 at 19:45 — 1 Comment

Having a series of failed experiments here

but then, it wouldn't be proper science if it worked straight off. Back to the soldering iron, or the gin and tonic.

Added by ian on March 31, 2015 at 18:19 — No Comments

Toys....

Just arrived, a USB sound card, an op amp, several jack plugs and a spool of platinum wire. Slime, you're gonna get probed :-) 

Added by ian on March 26, 2015 at 20:30 — No Comments

Why slime?

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.

I work with microscopes- my day job…

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Added by ian on March 26, 2015 at 20:27 — 2 Comments

call for papers: Slime Mould Computers: Prototypes, Models, Algorithms and Applications ECAL 2015

SPECIAL SESSION on Slime Mould Computers:

Prototypes, Models, Algorithms and Applications organised by Andrew Adamatsky at

The 13th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2015), York, UK

Theme of: Embodiment, Interaction, Conversation

20-24 July 2015 

Submission of papers: Monday 2nd March, 2015…

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Added by Heather Barnett on January 25, 2015 at 12:57 — No Comments

Great podcast review of slime mould documentary The Creeping Garden

"Opens a door you would never have opened on your own" 
Great podcast review of slime mould documentary The Creeping Garden

https://soundcloud.com/matt-21-1/outlier-podcast-2014-the-creeping-garden

Added by Heather Barnett on November 22, 2014 at 20:00 — No Comments

Need cultures of Physarum polycephalum

I have a visiting scientist (Dr. Hanh Tran) from Vietnam who is spending this academic year at the University of Arkansas. She is currently working with Physarum polycephalum.  We have the Carolina Biological strain and one wild strain collected locally but would like to have 2-3 additional strains. If anyone could send me a small portion of a sclerotium in an envelope, it would be greatly appreciated. My mailing address can be found on the University of Arkansas web site.

       …

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Added by Steven L. Stephenson on October 4, 2014 at 21:29 — 2 Comments

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