This Weirdly Smart, Creeping Slime Is Redefining Our Understanding of Intelligence

 

Imagine you're walking into a forest, and you roll over a fallen log with your foot. Fanning out on the underside, there is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out, if that something was banana-yellow and spread itself out into elegant fractal branches.

What you're looking at is the plasmodium form of Physarum polycephalum, the many-headed slime mold. Like other slime molds found in nature, it fills an important ecological role, aiding in the decay of organic matter to recycle it into the food web.

This bizarre little organism doesn't have a brain, or a nervous system – its blobby, bright-yellow body is just one cell. This slime mold species has thrived, more or less unchanged, for a billion years in its damp, decaying habitats.

And, in the last decade, it's been changing how we think about cognition and problem-solving.

"I think it's the same kind of revolution that occurred when people realized that plants could communicate with each other," says biologist Audrey Dussutour of the French National Center for Scientific Research.

"Even these tiny little microbes can learn. It gives you a bit of humility."

P. polycephalum in its natural habitat. (Kay Dee/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC)

P. polycephalum – adorably nicknamed "The Blob" by Dussutour – isn't exactly rare. It can be found in dark, humid, cool environments like the leaf litter on a forest floor. It's also really peculiar; although we call it a 'mold', it is not actually fungus. Nor is it animal or plant, but a member of the protist kingdom – a sort of catch-all group for anything that can't be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms.

It starts its life as many individual cells, each with a single nucleus. Then, they merge to form the plasmodium, the vegetative life stage in which the organism feeds and grows.

In this form, fanning out in veins to search for food and explore its environment, it's still a single cell, but containing millions or even billions of nuclei swimming in the cytoplasmic fluid confined within the bright-yellow membrane.

Cognition without a brain

Like all organisms, P. polycephalum needs to be able to make decisions about its environment. It needs to seek food and avoid danger. It needs to find the ideal conditions for its reproductive cycle. And this is where our little yellow friend gets really interesting. P. polycephalum doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't even have specialized tissues.

Yet it can solve complex puzzles, like labyrinth mazes, and remember novel substances. The kind of tasks we used to think only animals could perform.

"We're talking about cognition without a brain, obviously, but also without any neurons at all. So the underlying mechanisms, the whole architectural framework of how it deals with information is totally different to the way your brain works," biologist Chris Reid of Macquarie University in Australia tells ScienceAlert.

"By providing it with the same problem-solving challenges that we've traditionally given to animals with brains, we can start to see how this fundamentally different system might arrive at the same outcome. It's where it becomes clear that for a lot of these things – that we've always thought required a brain or some kind of higher information processing system – that's not always necessary."

(David Villa/ScienceImage/CBI/CNRS)

P. polycephalum is well known to science. Decades ago, it was, as physicist Hans-Günther Döbereiner of the University of Bremen in Germany explains, the "workhorse of cell biology". It was easy to clone, and keep, and study.

However, as our genetic analysis toolkits evolved, organisms such as mice or cell lines such as HeLa took over, and P. polycephalum fell by the wayside.

In 2000, biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of RIKEN in Japan brought the little beastie out of retirement – and not for cell biology. His paper, published in Nature, bore the title "Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism" – and that's exactly what P. polycephalum had done. Nakagaki and his team had put a piece of plasmodium at one end of a maze, a food reward (oats, because P. polycephalum loves oat bacteria) at the other, and watched what happened.

The results were stunning. This weird little acellular organism managed to find the fastest route through every maze thrown at it.

"That triggered a wave of research into what other kinds of more difficult scenarios we can test the slime mold with," Reid says.

"Virtually all of those have been surprising in some way or another, and surprised the researchers in how the slime mold actually performed. It revealed some limitations as well. But mostly, it's been a voyage of revelation on how this simple creature can do tasks that have always been given to and thought to be the domain of higher organisms."

Full of surprises

Nakagaki recreated the Tokyo subway, with the station nodes marked out with oats; P. polycephalum recreated it almost exactly – except the slime mold version was more robust to damage, wherein if a link got severed, the rest of the network could carry on.

Yet another team of researchers found that the protist could efficiently solve the traveling salesman problem, an exponentially complex mathematical task that programmers routinely use to test algorithms.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers found that P. polycephalum can "remember" where it has previously found food based on the structure of the veins in that area. This followed previous research from Dussutour and her colleagues, who discovered that blobs of slime mold could learn and remember substances that they didn't like, and communicate that information to other blobs of slime mold once they fused.

"I'm still amazed by how, in a way, complex they are because they always surprise you in an experiment, they would never do exactly what you choose to do," Dussutour says.

In one instance, her team was testing a growth medium used for mammal cells, and wanted to see if the slime would like it.

"It hated it. It started to build this weird three-dimensional structure so it could go on the lead and escape. And I'm like, 'oh my gosh, this organism'."

A processing network

Although it's technically a single-celled organism, P. polycephalum is considered a network, exhibiting collective behavior. Each part of the slime mold is operating independently and sharing information with its neighboring sections, with no centralized processing.

"I guess the analogy would be neurons in a brain," Reid says. "You have this one brain that's composed of lots of neurons – it's the same for the slime mold."

That brain analogy is a really intriguing one, and it wouldn't be the first time P. polycephalum has been compared to a network of neurons. The topology and structure of brain networks and slime mold blobs are very similar, and both systems exhibit oscillations.

It's not entirely clear how information is propagated and shared in the slime mold, but we do know that P. polycephalum's veins contract to act as a peristaltic pump, pushing cytoplasmic fluid from section to section. And oscillations in this fluid seem to coincide with encounters with external stimuli.

"It's thought that these oscillations convey information, process information, by the way they interact and actually produce the behavior at the same time," Döbereiner tells ScienceAlert.

"If you have a network of Physarum go to a certain food, it changes oscillation pattern when it encounters sugar: it starts to oscillate quicker. Because of these quicker oscillations, the whole organism starts changing its oscillation pattern and starts to flow into the direction where the food was found."

He and colleagues recently published a paper demonstrating that these oscillations are extraordinarily similar to the oscillations seen in a brain, only a hydrodynamic system rather than electrical signals.

"What's relevant is not so much what oscillates and how the information is transported," he explains, "but that it oscillates and that a topology is relevant – is one neuron connected to 100 neurons or just to two; is a neuron connected just to its neighbors or is it connected to another neuron very far away."

P. polycephalum growing on a life-sized model of a human skull. (Andrew Adamatzky, Artifical Life, 2015)

Defining cognition

As exciting as its escapades may seem, any researcher working with it will tell you that P. polycephalum is not, in itself, a brain. It's not capable of higher-level processing or abstract reasoning, as far as we can tell.

Nor is it, as intriguing as the notion may seem, likely to evolve into something like a brain. The organism has had a billion years to do so and shows no sign of going in that direction (although if any science fiction writers out there like the idea, feel free to run with it).

In terms of overall biology, slime mold is extremely simple. And by that very fact, it's changing how we understand problem-solving.

Just like other organisms, it needs food, it needs to navigate its environment, and it needs a safe place to grow and reproduce. These problems can be complex, and yet P. polycephalum can solve them with its extremely limited cognitive architecture. It does so in its own simple way and with its own limitations, says Reid, "but that in itself is one of the beautiful things about the system". 

In a sense, it leaves us with an organism – a wet, slimy, damp-loving blob – whose cognition is fundamentally different from our own. And, just like the Tokyo subway, that can teach us new ways to solve our own problems.

"It's teaching us about the nature of intelligence, really, challenging certain views, and basically widening the concept," Reid says.

"It does force us to challenge these long-held anthropocentric beliefs that we are unique and capable of so much more than other creatures."

How Would You React If We Discovered Alien Life?

 

  Experts weigh in on what the detection of other life forms might mean to humanity. or quite a century, from George Melies’ a visit to the Moon to Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. and shut Encounters to the present summer’s blockbuster sequel to July 4, mass media, and also the general public, have pondered what's going to happen if we ever came into contact with extraterrestrial life forms. Carl Sagan’s book Contact, and Jodie Foster’s movie of the identical name, explores one possible scenario within which an exploration for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) scientist (played by Foster) discovers a sign repeating a sequence of prime numbers originating from star system Vega, the 5th brightest star visible from Earth. whether or not Contact’s version of an alien encounter is more likely than that presented in Spielberg’s E.T., the probabilities are worth pondering.

=And yet experts believe that the percentages of receiving a radio transmission composed of prime numbers or encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life within the near future are “astronomical.” even with Hillary Clinton’s promise that if elected President, she would open up the “X-files” (Area 51).

But the chances are also increasing because of continuing advances in technology and money. At a news conference held in April in big apple City, Russian billionaire and Breakthrough Prize co-founder Yuri Milner, together with a famed physicist, announced Breakthrough Starshot, a 20-year voyage to the Alpha Centauri star system. Should the existence of planets within the binary star system be confirmed, Starshot could provide us with the simplest measurements of an exoplanet atmosphere we could ever hope to urge this century. Milner will spend $100 million dollars to fund the project. Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is on the project’s board of directors.

The goal of NASA’s Kepler Mission was to search out terrestrial planets within the habitable zone of stars both near and much where liquid water and possibly life might exist. To date, Kepler has confirmed the existence of two,337 exoplanets, including 1,284 new planets announced as of this writing. in a very handout issued by NASA, chief scientist Ellen Stofan, said, “This announcement quite doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler. this offers us hope that somewhere out there, around a star very like ours, we will eventually discover another Earth.”

But what would happen if we discovered life beyond Earth?

Christof Koch, president, and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for neuroscience, believe most people are excited to be told that there's intelligent life out there. “For some ‘contact” would be a wish come true and fill us with awe. except for others, it might raise concerns. One can’t assume that alien cultures are by definition benevolent,” Koch says. “If we glance at the history of our world, lesser civilizations were often destroyed by more advanced ones. Would the identical happen to us if we encountered a complicated alien civilization?” Hawking has warned against sending messages out into space for this very reason.

Koch has devoted his life to defining what consciousness is whether or not it's the net, robots, animals, etc. Since it's doubtful that our first contact is going to be with humans from another planet it's important for us to know what consciousness is so we are able to better understand what we do discover as we explore space. “The first discovery would probably be bacteria which could excite some scientists but not the final public. Another scenario may well be a radio wave whose origin would be questioned. Was it a deliberate signal sent to us or is it random noise that will be explained scientifically? I'm not holding my breath for a sign that has prime numbers,” Koch says.

Mary A. Voytek is that the senior scientist and head of NASA’s Astrobiology Program who started Nexus for Exoplanet System Science to go looking for all times on exoplanets. She notes that NASA scientists are currently staring at the foremost extreme conditions on Earth to raised understand what conditions can support life throughout the universe.  “If we will determine what makes a habitable planet on Earth it'll help guide us to seem for conditions within the universe,” she says. Voytek notes that NASA acknowledges that the invention of life has significance beyond science: “In order to totally understand the societal implications, we must discuss with the experts-scholars in sociology and therefore the humanities likewise as theologians.”

“When I give lectures about my work, most people are excited about the likelihood of the invention of extraterrestrial life,” Voytek says. “This is nothing new… the traditional Greek atomists within the fourth century B.C. wrote about it. there's a quote by Democritus that I favor to cite. ‘To consider the planet because the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd on assert that in a whole field sown with millet just one grain will grow.’”

Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) has devoted much of his career with SETI to exploring what would happen on first contact and the way we could even initiate it through interstellar messages. He says the bulk of individuals believe that intelligent life is widespread within the cosmos.e agrees that a discovery of something sort of a radio emission would end in arguments, in addition to a fading lack of interest thanks to time. “It could take decades or maybe many years for us to urge a response from a symbol we transfer. For those that are accustomed to instant communication, this may be frustrating,” Vakoch says.

Others think we’ll have a more dramatic experience. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy and scientific discipline at the University of Connecticut and a fellow of the middle for Theological Inquiry, believes that if we do find intelligent life, it'll possibly be within the sort of super-intelligent computer science. “For some people, this could be hard to simply accept. Discovering a civilization that's now not biological would be scary for us,” But Schneider is optimistic that almost all people will find the invention of benevolent intelligent life exciting. “People are excited by the unknown. and therefore the discovery of a brand new civilization may need many potential benefits. Perhaps a complicated civilization will share their knowledge with us,” Schneider says. The Catholic Church has come a protracted way since the times of Galileo. Pope Francis made headlines when he said he would baptize Martians. Many were surprised at the Pope’s remarks, but the Vatican has been positive about aliens for several years. Father Jose Gabriel Funes, a priest and an astronomer, views aliens as brothers and said the Church has no problem with the concept of intelligent life within the cosmos. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno is that the first clergyman to win the Carl Sagan Medal and also the current president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. in an exceedingly 2014 article within the Christian Post, Consolmagno said “the general public won't be too surprised when life on other planets is eventually discovered and can react in much the identical way it did when news broke within the ’90s that there are other planets orbiting distant stars.”

A similar view is held by Orthodox Jews. In an e-mail to me, Rabbi Ben Tzion Krasnianski, director of Chabad of the Upperside of Manhattan, wrote, “Jews believe other life forms. The universe is populated with an infinite amount of them. they're not physical, however, rather they're angels who are spiritually conscious beings that are beyond anything we could imagine. The Talmud says one angel’s mind is that the equivalent of a 3rd of the world’s population’s intelligence combined. For us, it’s no surprise that we aren't alone within the larger universe.”

Vakoch said people must detain mind that we are only at the start of exploration. “We have just started looking. it's only been some hundred years that we’ve been a technologically advanced society. That’s a really touch of your time in our universe.”

ASTRONOMERS HAVE DISCOVERED ANOTHER EARTH

 

It’s big news, set to shock, amaze, and entertain the world.

But unfortunately, it has nothing to do with a second Earth or better with that planet

Earth.

However, since you are now reading, you will almost certainly be interested in this 

research which examined the click and share behavior of social media users who read 

(or not) the content and then share it on social media. We are here on Sci-Tech 

Universe has long noticed that many of our followers will appreciate, share and 

offer a happy opinion on an article, all without ever reading it. We are not alone 

in noticing this. Last April, NPR shared an article on their Facebook page asking 

"Why does America no longer read?". The joke, of course, is that there were no 

articles. They waited to see if their followers would have pondered an opinion 

without clicking on the link and were not disappointed.

We hoped for an opportunity to try it ourselves and this seemed the perfect 

opportunity.

A team of computer scientists from Columbia University and the French National 

Institute examined a dataset of over 2.8 million online news articles shared via 

Twitter. The study found that up to 59 percent of the links shared on Twitter were 

never actually clicked on by that person's followers, suggesting that social media 

users prefer to share content rather than clicking on it and reading it.

"People are more willing to share an article than to read it," said study co-author 

Arnaud Legout in a statement, the Washington Post reports. “This is typical of modern

information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary or summary of 

summaries, without making the effort to investigate. "

This study examines the psychology behind what makes people want to share content. 

Research conducted by the New York Times Customer Insight Group investigated what 

motivates people to share information. Just under half of the people surveyed said 

they shared information on social media to inform people and "enrich" those around 

them. Instead, they found 68 percent of the odds to reinforce and project their image

- in a way, to "define" them

In the words of a participant in the study: "I try to share only information that will
strengthen the image I would like to present: thoughtful, reasoned, kind, interested 
and passionate about certain things".
This also raises the question of whether online media is just a massive "echo chamber"
where we all like only pages and views that reinforce our beliefs and are not 
interested in information for information purposes. Social media site algorithms 
also mean that the individuals or pages you tend to click, like or share - which 
are often the articles or views you agree with - will appear more frequently in your 
feed than news.

As an online media user, you are probably quite aware of this.

So if you are one of the lucky few who managed to click and read this article, we 
congratulate you! Although sorry for the misleading title. In the meantime, have fun 
sharing the article and see who can chair a discussion on Earth 2.0 without ever 
reading it.

THESIS OF ARAB PHD STUDENT SHOWS ‘SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE’ THAT THE EARTH IS REALLY FLAT!

 

• A student pursuing a PhD in science has a thesis about ‘flat earth’
• It’s full of ‘scientific claims’ that’s against scientific breakthroughs from the past.
• It was leaked by a former president of the Tunisian Astronomical Association.

This Arab student who is pursuing a doctorate in science hits the "globe" with his thesis 

that allegedly shows that the Earth is flat. Really flat.

It's not all! the thesis states that the earth does not move, the Universe is geocentric 

(We are the center of the Universe) and that the world is 13,500 years old.

starting from all this, the student completely rejected the Newton and Einstein schools of 

thought when it comes to physics, the heliocentric views of Kepler and Copernicus and many 

other scientific discoveries established in the past.

The thesis continues with the statements, and here are some:

Aliens may have Existed On Earth. Here’s Why They Left

 

It is one of humanity's most consuming questions, fascinating scientists, governments and 

pop culture alike. But now, an American space scientist claims that advanced life forms 

could be a reality, but that they disappeared long ago.

Professor Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State 

University, has published an article on arXiv entitled "Previous indigenous technological 

species".

He claims that ancient "technological species" may have lived on Earth billions of years 

before the human race. Well, either the Earth, or a "pre-greenhouse Venus", or "a wet Mars". 

It is not 100% secure.

However, Wright says:

Since it is known to host a complex life, the most obvious origin for a previous species of 

any kind is Earth.

He does not punch when he explains that:

Today's Venus would seem a terrible candidate for a technological species, with a surface 

temperature of over 700K, although when it comes to alien life we ​​should keep an open mind 

on this too.

Wright believes that ancient species have disappeared, but that in the past we could have 

found traces of them underground, called "tecnosignature". However, he says that most of the 

physical evidence would have been lost.

On Venus, for example, the global arrival of the greenhouse could have caused a re-emergence 

of the planet, while on Earth the movement of the tectonic plates and the subsequent erosion 

could have canceled any persistent traces. However, he writes, it may still be possible to 

recognize these techno-markings even if the physical evidence is almost destroyed.

He explains:

Structures buried under surfaces could survive and be discovered as long as they do not 

undergo a collision so severe as to destroy their artificial nature. Destroying them would 

simply make them non-functional, but they could still be recognizable technological. We could 

speculate that settlements or bases on these objects would have been built below the surface 

for a variety of reasons, and that therefore they are still discovered today.

He claims that ancient "technological species" may have lived on Earth billions of years 

before the human race. Well, either the Earth, or a "pre-greenhouse Venus", or "a wet Mars". 

It is not 100% secure.

However, Wright says:

Since it is known to host a complex life, the most obvious origin for an earlier species of 

any kind is Earth.

He does not punch when he explains that:

Today's Venus would seem a terrible candidate for a technological species, with a surface 

temperature of over 700K, although when it comes to alien life we ​​should keep an open mind on 

this too.

Wright believes that ancient species have disappeared, but that in the past we could have 

found traces of them underground, called "tecnosignature". However, he says that most of the 

physical evidence would have been lost.

On Venus, for example, the global arrival of the greenhouse could have caused a re-emergence 

of the planet, while on Earth the movement of the tectonic plates and the subsequent erosion 

could have canceled any persistent traces. However, he writes, it may still be possible to 

recognize these techno-markings even if the physical evidence is almost destroyed.

He explains:

Structures buried under surfaces could survive and be discovered as long as they do not 

undergo a collision so serious as to destroy their artificial nature. Destroying them would 

simply make them non-functional, but they could still be recognizable technological. We could 

speculate that settlements or bases on these objects would have been built below the surface 

for a variety of reasons, and that therefore they are still discovered today.

CONGRESSMAN FORCED NASA TO DENY THERE WAS A LONG-LOST CIVILIZATION ON MARS

 

The meeting of the Chamber's Scientific, Space and Technology Committee is usually a serious

matter in which the representatives of the NASA space agency are grilled on the practical 

aspects of the ongoing projects and the allocation of the budget. However, things took a 

turn for the esoteric this week when NASA representatives were grilled by a congressman that 

Mars could never have been the home of an ancient civilization.


NASA SCIENTIST GRID ON LIFE ON MARS BY A CONGRESSMAN


The meeting started fairly normally, with one of NASA's top scientists Ken Farley appeared 

before the House committee to update representatives on plans for the next Mars rover 

mission. In the course of his testimony in the House, Farley told members of Congress that 

it appears that the Red Planet was once home to a vast body of water in the distant past. 

This revelation prompted California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to dig deeper.


"You indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago," the politician asked 

Farley, "is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?" 

Farley replied that he had no evidence to suggest that an alien civilization had ever 

populated the Red Planet and seemed to be quite amused by the interrogation line. However, 

Rohrabacher was undaunted and asked Farley if he would rule out the possibility that there 

had ever been an ancient civilization on Mars. In response, Farley said, "I would say it is 

extremely unlikely."

It is believed that in the distant past, Mars was a habitable planet with a strong 

atmosphere that would perhaps have allowed the development of extra-terrestrial life. 

However, no evidence has ever been discovered to suggest that once intelligent life roamed 

the surface of the Red Planet and scientists believe that if there was life on Mars, it 

would probably be just microbial.

7 MIND-BLOWING FACTS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE TO PUT YOUR EGO IN CHECK

 

Tyson once said, "If your ego starts," I'm important, I'm great, I'm special ",
you feel a little disappointed when you look around what we have discovered about the 
universe. "No, you are not big. No you are not. You are small in time and space." From 
time to time, it is important to put things in perspective. Or, as the astrophysicist Neil 
deGrasse Tyson would tell you, leave you breathless: consider for a moment that while the 
Earth has an equatorial diameter of 7,926 miles, the Milky Way is about 
621,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. These seven facts of NASA will leave you speechless and 
your ego will also return to earth.



1. There are more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth put together. Our 
sun is one of at least 100 billion stars, right in the Milky Way. Scientists have estimated 
that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each full of stars.

NASA/Tumblr — Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation.

The first planet that was found outside of our solar system was in 1995, and now only

in a very short span of time, thousands of planets have been found in orbit around 

sun-like stars, also known as exoplanets.



2. Can you imagine the speed of light? If you move with the speed of light, it would 

take you 100,000 years to cross a Milky Way.

3. Only 5 percent of the universe has been observed till now, and round about 70 percent of the universe is made of dark energy.

4. If the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be the size of a nickel.

5. The sun is so much huge that it contains all the mass in our solar system and all other planets and everything contains only 0.2 percent.

6. It has been discovered that the universe is expanding and that at one point in time the universe was all collected in just one point of space, through Edwin Hubble.

7. Voyager 1 is the American spacecraft out, more than 11 billion miles from our sun. It was the first man-made object to leave our solar system. Four are headed out of our solar system as well. 

Voyager 2 is going as well at 39,000 mph, but will take more than 296,000 years to pass, the brightest star in our night sky, known as Sirius.