The Audacity of Brainless Slime Mold

As any proud iPhone 5 owner knows, even genius takes a day off once in a while: When Apple decided to ditch Google and rebuild its popular Maps app using a proprietary platform, the result was a colossal cartographic #fail that still gets cited in Apple’s current share price travails. The sloppy coding directed users onto airport runways, into the ocean, and even inspired its own Tumblr.

Brainless slime mold—yes, that’s the official scientific nomenclature—has no such problems. In fact, it doesn’t even have a central nervous system. But in a paper published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Australian and French researchers showed that the unicellular protist knows how to “map” its surroundings and navigate complex mazes in order to find food.

Such behavior, from an organism with no consciousness, sheds light on the origin and evolution of memory among us brainier creatures.

“External memory,” the authors write, is a common phenomenon in nature: ants use pheromone trails to find their way from food source to nest; bees use landmarks to guide their in-flight navigation. Such tactics, biologists believe, likely preceded “internal memory” and allowed simple life forms to solve spatial problems, long before they could “think” or “feel.” Even robots learn this way. A robot can, of course, come pre-loaded with a map of its environment, or be programmed to build one as it explores—but such capabilities are technologically expensive. A simpler robot might instead employ “reactive navigation,” and solve spatial problems by keeping track only of its immediate surroundings.

So it is with brainless slime mold: no fancy on-board computer, no nervous system, no memory. But that doesn’t prevent it from making smart decisions.

The researchers report that when Physarum polycephalum “senses” food—via the activation of membrane surface receptors—and begins to flow in its direction, the mold leaves behind a “thick mat of nonliving, translucent, extracellular slime” in its wake. (Consider the slug.) When it begins to “forage” again, it will “choose” to explore new territory by avoiding its old, slime-covered path. (Only if there are no virgin swaths of Petri dish to traverse will the mold double back on its previous turf.) Such behavior, the researchers write, “strongly suggests that it can sense extracellular slime upon contact, and uses its presence as an externalized spatial memory system to recognize and avoid areas it has already explored.”

To test this, the biologists ran a series of Petri dish trials involving U-shaped mazes.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing. Half the dishes contained only agar. The other half were pre-coated in slime, effectively jamming the mold’s radar. On these dishes,Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers. the mold had no way to find (and thus avoid) its own navigational trail. The results were striking: when the mold’s “external memory” was blocked, it failed to escape the U-trap and find its way to a food source two-thirds of the time; when its external memory was uncompromised, however, the slimy subject performed almost flawlessly. It also spent dramatically less time exploring tracts of Petri dish where it had already been, and hewed closer to the optimal search route. By taking advantage of an “externalized spatial memory system,” the researchers conclude, the mold greatly enhances its navigational ability.

This is not the first time scientists have used brainless slime mold to shed light on how higher-order creatures like us humans interact with our spatial environment. In 2010, Japanese researchers at Hokkaido University devised a clever experiment that modeled the Tokyo rail system in a Petri dish of Physarum polycephalum. They distributed 36 food sources to match the geographic locations of cities around the Japanese capital, and turned the slime mold loose to see how efficiently it would connect the dots. The authors found that the resulting network closely matched the city’s real-world railways—a neat trick considering that Physarum has no capacity for central planning or urban design.

Rhodes’ home of more than 40 years had been in foreclosure since 2008, so he was nervous about the unexpected evening visit. Being on disability and going through a divorce, he could no longer afford to make payments on his mortgage loan.

To his surprise, the visitor was not the sheriff but Buck Bagot, one of the founders of Occupy Bernal. Bagot had received Rhodes’ address earlier that day and wasted no time in reaching out.

Sixty-one year-old Bagot, short-haired and bespectacled, is not the stereotypical masked conspirator you might expect to lead a local branch of the global Occupy movement. The only hint of his affiliation is a small 99 percent pin on the lapel of his leather jacket.

A product of the white, working-class town of Trenton, N.J., Bagot attended a prep school on scholarship — and was hazed because of his financial aid. He still bears scars on his wrist, and credits the experience with helping him to forge a strong class consciousness and identification with the disenfranchised.

Drawn to San Francisco in 1976 for its economic and ethnic diversity, Bagot has been a community organizer ever since. He currently works with national nonprofit organizations, training people to lobby members of Congress in their district, and tries to reduce violence in subsidized housing.

Bagot is the founder and former codirector of the long-standing nonprofit Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, which has more than 600 dues-paying members and has built almost 500 units of affordable housing, provided youth with services and organizing tools, and helped about 125 seniors stay in their homes and live independently.

Occupy Bernal got its start in December of 2011, when Bagot got a phone call from Bernal activists and performance artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. They told him that the home of their neighbor Thomas German, a 72-year-old who has lived in Bernal since the 1960s, was going into foreclosure.

Bagot had been working with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (formerly ACORN) to block evictions and foreclosures in Bayview-Hunters Point, and Stephens and Sprinkle sought his advice.

Unaware that foreclosures were also a problem in his neighborhood, Bagot was eager to help.

They went on to save German’s home, and found that 80 people were in foreclosure in Bernal Heights.flash drive and USB flash drives wholesale logo printing in Malaysia. Naming themselves Occupy Bernal and working with ACCE,A lanyard may refer to a rope or cord worn around the neck or wrist to carry an object. they went door to door and recruited “foreclosure fighters.”

Since the program began,We are Malaysia company specialize in customized silicone bracelet. Bagot says, no resident they have worked with has had their home auctioned off, and 10 have received affordable loan modifications.

“We’re not advocates, we are organizers,” he said. “We met our neighbors, helped them overcome the shame of being in foreclosure, helped them understand what had happened to them. They just thought they were all by themselves.”

This was the beginning of Occupy Bernal, which continues to focus on the issue of foreclosures in Bernal Heights. The organization involves as many as 80 people, 75 percent of whom were at one time faced with foreclosure themselves.