Slime Design Mimics Tokyo's Rail System
ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2010) — What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.
This is the network formation in Physarum polycephalum. (A) At t =0, a small plasmodium of Physarum was placed at the location of Tokyo in an experimental arena bounded by the Pacific coastline (white border) and supplemented with additional food sources at each of the major cities in the region (white dots). (B to F) The plasmodium grew out from the initial food source with a contiguous margin and progressively colonized each of the food sources. Behind the growing margin, the spreading mycelium resolved into a network of tubes interconnecting the food sources. (Credit: Image courtesy of Science/AAAS)
This revelation comes after a team of Japanese and British researchers observed that the slime mold connected itself to scattered food sources in a design that was nearly identical to Tokyo's rail system.
The related report will be published by the journal Science on 22 January.
Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, along with colleagues elsewhere in Japan and the United Kingdom, placed oat flakes on a wet surface in locations that corresponded to the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed thePhysarum polycephalum mold to grow outwards from the center. They watched the slime mold self-organize, spread out, and form a network that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network.
"Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources," Tero writes in the report. "Physarum is a large, single-celled amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributed food sources... [It] can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection."
...
