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Slime Mould / Slime Mold

As I learn more and more about the diversity of life on Earth, I realize how screwed our preconceived notions of life on other worlds is. When we finally make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, we are going to have to deal with new ways of looking at life, death, individuality, intelligence, ethics, sex, marriage, rape, murder, war, "human" rights, and a whole lot more.
 
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As I learn more and more about the diversity of life on Earth, I realize how screwed our preconceived notions of life on other worlds is. When we finally make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, we are going to have to deal with new ways of looking at life, death, individuality, intelligence, ethics, sex, marriage, rape, murder, war, "human" rights, and a whole lot more.

What about when we finally discover intelligent life on Earth?

HURR.
 
As I learn more and more about the diversity of life on Earth, I realize how screwed our preconceived notions of life on other worlds is. When we finally make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, we are going to have to deal with new ways of looking at life, death, individuality, intelligence, ethics, sex, marriage, rape, murder, war, "human" rights, and a whole lot more.

Maybe they will be worst than we are in those respects. After all, their alledged contacts so far haven't given a good impression.
 
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Newly published research explains how a slime mold can 'encode information' to serve as a 'memory' (e.g., for where it found food).
This gooey, brainless blob can store memories

A neon-yellow slime mold can store memories, even though it lacks a nervous system. Now, scientists have found a new clue as to how the brainless blob manages this impressive feat.

... The blobs can exist as one tiny cell with one nucleus, the cell's control center, or multiple cells can fuse together to form one gargantuan cell with many nuclei. These fused cells can grow to cover dozens of square inches (hundreds of square centimeters) in area.

When fused, the huge cells form a complex network of internal tubing; these tubes contract, similar to blood vessels, to push fluid and nutrients through the brainless blob.

The new study, published Feb. 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that the diameters of these branching tubes can encode information, such as where the slime mold has recently found food. When the blob finds food, it rapidly reorganizes its tubular network, widening some tubes and shrinking others, and this architecture remains in place even after the blobs have eaten the food. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/slime-mold-memories.html
 
Here are the bibliographic specifics and abstract for the published article about slime mold 'memory' ...

Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network
Mirna Kramar, Karen Alim
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Mar 2021, 118 (10) e2007815118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2007815118

Abstract
The concept of memory is traditionally associated with organisms possessing a nervous system. However, even very simple organisms store information about past experiences to thrive in a complex environment—successfully exploiting nutrient sources, avoiding danger, and warding off predators. How can simple organisms encode information about their environment? We here follow how the giant unicellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum responds to a nutrient source. We find that the network-like body plan of the organism itself serves to encode the location of a nutrient source. The organism entirely consists of interlaced tubes of varying diameters. Now, we observe that these tubes grow and shrink in diameter in response to a nutrient source, thereby imprinting the nutrient’s location in the tube diameter hierarchy. Combining theoretical model and experimental data, we reveal how memory is encoded: a nutrient source locally releases a softening agent that gets transported by the cytoplasmic flows within the tubular network. Tubes receiving a lot of softening agent grow in diameter at the expense of other tubes shrinking. Thereby, the tubes’ capacities for flow-based transport get permanently upgraded toward the nutrient location, redirecting future decisions and migration. This demonstrates that nutrient location is stored in and retrieved from the networks’ tube diameter hierarchy. Our findings explain how network-forming organisms like slime molds and fungi thrive in complex environments. We here identify a flow networks’ version of associative memory—very likely of relevance for the plethora of living flow networks as well as for bioinspired design.

SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e2007815118
 
This Brainless Slime Mold Can Decide Where to Go Without Having Already Been There

sciencealert.com
15 July, 2021


A slippery yellow slime that lives in the damp undergrowth is continuing to test our understanding of what it means to make decisions.

Physarum polycephalum, AKA the many-headed slime mold, uses its body to physically sense its environment before making a decision about where it wants to go, new research has found. It's the latest in an impressive list of ways the single-celled organism has blown our minds lately.

"People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn't have a brain but it can still perform a lot of the behaviors that we associate with thinking," said neuroscientist Nirosha Murugan of Algoma University in Canada.

"Figuring out how proto-intelligent life manages to do this type of computation gives us more insight into the underpinnings of animal cognition and behavior, including our own."

P. polycephalum is a curious little organism. It's not actually a fungus at all; nor is it an animal or a plant. It belongs to the protist kingdom - basically anything that doesn't belong in the other three kingdoms. It lives in dark, humid environments like forest floors, aiding in the decomposition of organic matter and recycling it back into the food web.

Physarum starts its life as many individual cells, each with its own nucleus. These cells merge to form the plasmodium, a large, single cell containing millions or even billions of nuclei swimming in a cytoplasmic fluid. This is the vegetative stage of life, in which the protist moves about, feeds, and grows.

(...)

https://www.sciencealert.com/slime-...where-to-go-without-having-already-been-there
 
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