All Blog Posts (122)

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

Chris R. Reida, Tanya Lattya, Audrey Dussutourc, and Madeleine Beekmana…

Hi!

I am a swedish designer in need for slime mold, do you have any idea where I could order it or could someone send it to me from here? :)

Thanks

Linnea

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

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!

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…

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

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

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. 

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 ),…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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

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…

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…