All Blog Posts (132)

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…

"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

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.

       …

Hi everyone! I am new here and am wondering if there are any other teachers who use slime mold in their classes. I teach AP biology at a high school in Phoenix, AZ, and am interested in incorporating slime molds into my classes in reference to cell communication.

I am also curious how and where you order slime mold.

Thanks!

Hello.  I am a photographer who specialises in fungi and nature photography.  In my search for fungi I often come across slime mould and I find it fascinating.  I do not grow the slime mould in Petri dishes, but I do sometimes observe the growth on old fallen wood or other substrate, as it competes for food with other animals, plants or fungi.  Here are some still photos I have taken of some of our local (Eastern Australian) slime mould.…

Thanks to everyone who contributed to my slime mould talk at the recent TEDSalon Berlin event. The slime moulds (and me) were warmly received! Here's a mini review from the event: http://blog.ted.com/2014/06/24/7-things-i-learned-at-the-tedsalon-berlin/

I'll post notes and links from the talk here soon.

Hi,

I am trying to grow my Slime Mould, it was growing great but suddenly stopped. I think it dried out, so I add some boiled water (cold), cleaned the Petri Dish and gave it new oats, nothing happened. Then I change to a agar base, but nothing happens. Maybe I used the wrong agar, but it stopped growing and I think its getting really mouldy. :(

Here is a picture of my pet in the agar.

Here is the link of the process: …

i'm doing an experiment with slime mold but i don't know where know where to get some, can anyone help me out?!?!

For anyone in London next weekend, I am giving a talk and running a workshop on Physarum polycephalum.

Saturday 25 January 2014, 11.30-14.00

Full info and booking at: https://www.societyofbiology.org/events?event_id=313

The talk will introduce the biology and diverse areas of research working with Physarum as a model organism, and I will talk about my studio practice (studies and…

If you are in Rotterdam on Friday 27 September we are running an experiment to see if humans can follow a few simple behavioural rules of the plasmodial slime mould in order to communicate, navigate and cooperate. 

We are inviting people to participant and become a human slime mould super-cell, or come along to observe what happens.

Info and booking at:beingslimemould.eventbrite.com

Coming up in Rotterdam Sept-Jan... 

slimoco exhibits a three part interactive installation 'Being Slime Mould: observation, simulation, enactment', as part of 'BIODESIGN

On the Cross-Pollination of Nature, Science and Creativity' at New Institute, Rotterdam.…