Selects: Slime Mold: 0% Mold, 100% Amazing

26:19Yeah. Yeah. Like it could conceivably get to it, like you said, four different ways. But that fast way was the way it would just like that's impressive. That's definitely noteworthy. You can write multiple papers on that kind of study. And so another Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sake. A researcher named Atsushi Taro from Hokkaido University. Did you like that? Yeah, it's good. And Dr. Taro said, all right, what about this? What if we take some oat flakes and basically make a general map of the neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime mold does with that? Put a little slime mold in a Petri dish with these oat flakes that kind of mimic the neighborhoods of Tokyo and watch it go.

27:03I think over the course of like four or five days, right? Yeah. And you might think, cool, it does what it does and it goes after that food in the most direct way possible, which is what it did. But here's where it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they overlaid a map of the current Tokyo railway commuter system, the subway system. Sure. And they laid it over this grid of this slime and it was almost a perfect match. Isn't that nuts? That's, I mean, I had to reread that like five times. Right. To even believe that that's what happened, that this slime basically figured out the most efficient route to get around essentially Tokyo.

27:50Yes, which, I mean, humans had figured out too, but it took teams of human engineers and a very long time for them to figure this out, right? So the slime mold was just like, this is nothing. What else you got? You got any more cities that are more densely populated with more neighborhoods? Because I'll just make your subway maps all day long, basically. And they're like, no, Tokyo is probably one of the most dits. Right. It's like, okay. I saw another similar kind of bit of research, Chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. Wow. This is crazy.

28:29This is like an archaeological study. And they put some, they sicked some pfisarium on it, and it mimicked ancient Roman roads that had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten, and ones that were well known in the Balkans. It mimicked these Roman roads, like things that people had been like, okay, this is the best route from this city to this city. The slime mold did basically the same thing and apparently revealed some lost stuff. Yeah, I mean, I guess it could also, it's interesting, Like, if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment like this, does that mean, like, the humans get it wrong?

29:10Like, can they use this as a test and be like, sorry, the slime mold has spoken? I guess so. I kind of like the octopus picking the World Cup. You know, they always take the World Cup away if the other team that the octopus didn't win ends up winning, you know? Well, I wonder if you, I mean, and we'll get to real applications of this, But I wonder if they could do something like that where, let's say, they look at the Tokyo system and a couple of places it didn't match. They're like, we totally should have gone this way. Yes. I feel like that that is the direction that people are kind of going in, that they could conceivably use this for planning new stuff, you know?

29:48Wow. So every city planner will have a slime mold researcher at their best. Yeah. I mean, like, this is crazy. Why not? It's pretty cool. All you have to do is have some oat flakes and a petri dish and you're good. So I think we should take another break. What do you think? Quite frankly, we want to eat some oat flakes right about now. I'm kind of in the mood for that too. We'll be right back.

30:22New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt and I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hurricane DeBolu. It's a new year and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

30:57Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection.

31:35We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the Men's Clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name.

32:14In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved. Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy and some compassion. If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

33:04Okay. Did you just eat some oat flakes? I did not. All right. We'll get you some. Because here's the secret, everybody. When we take a break, we don't really go take a break. No. We should. You could have had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and just eaten them real quick. I don't know. I can't see. So, all right. We've said that these things don't have brains. They don't have – and I don't think we mentioned – it's not like they have a – it's not like they're jellyfish and they have some sort of weird neural net. Right. They got nothing like that at all. Nothing. Like they have no way of generating consciousness in any form that we recognize.

33:44And yet slime mold is teaching us to open our horizons. In hearts. Sure. To new ideas of what constitutes consciousness and intelligence. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like it makes sense as a swarm, as a bunch of cellular slime mold makes sense. We're already familiar with the hive mind and, you know, the emergent property of a bunch of different things, you know, operating together. The real puzzler, though, is the single cell plasmodial slime mold. That's one big giant cell. And the fact that it behaves in ways that seem conscious to some degree. Yeah. So if you want to kind of go back in time to where a lot of this research started, it wasn't actually in Japan, but it was in the 1960s.

34:32A physicist named Evelyn Fox Keller was curious if she could use math to model biological systems because they had had success using math to explain and expand our understanding of physics. So she was like, let me see if we can do this with biology. and someone said, well, you got to meet Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel got a little surprise for you and Lee Siegel got together and said, oh, Dr. Keller, you need to meet our friend Slime Mold. And Dr. Keller was like, this is the 1960s. I don't know what Slime Mold is yet. And Keller and, sorry, Siegel said, oh, well, just take a seat and let me tell you about this, which is Dictostelium, Dictostelium, right?

35:24Dictostelium discoidium. I think that's discoides. Discoidium? Yeah. Okay. But it's the one we were talking about earlier that creates the stems. They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the spores. Right. And I think this was just significant because it was kind of like the first time anyone had observed and, you know, fell off of their lab stool and could explain it to others, these pseudoplasmodiums. But what they were missing was they were like, all right, we see this happening and it's amazing. And how are they doing this though? And the very first thing they thought of is like, maybe it's like an ant colony or something.

36:00And maybe there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell, or maybe a few of them that get together and they just sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and say, go this way. And the rest are just sort of the worker ants that follow along. Yeah. And they knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical AMP, which is related to ATP, the adenosine triphosphate. And that that was how they were signaling. But they thought that, like you're saying, that there are just a few signaling everybody else was responding. And what they figured out is that they had that totally wrong that there weren't leaders there weren't pacemakers who were in charge of like you know signaling and in effect making decisions for the group that it was actually like a group effort and that the the whatever um whatever cell or slug that they're called in this cellular slime mold swarm was closest to food it would signal uh a with amp that hey there's some food over here let's all go over this way and that signal would just kind of be passed along through the swarm through the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move toward the food and start eating.

37:10Yeah, and this was, you know, I mean, you can see why they went in that initial direction, because it made sense, and a lot of nature is organized with a top-down principle in mind. Humans often organize with a top-down principle, big business, government. It's just a system that we're used to seeing in nature and in people, And so it made sense that they went that way, and they never really thought about the fact that it could be like, no, it's a total bottom-up system, and whatever is closest can send out these signals. Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy, it's more like how a flock of birds operates, a flock of seagulls haircut operates.

37:53They run so far away? Yeah, but it's the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from. is the first to run and everybody else follows. It's kind of like how a flock of birds will turn depending on, you know, which way they need to turn based on that bird making that decision and the rest of the flock basically following it. It's a bottom-up decision-making kind of thing. And so we started to learn a lot. We know a lot about bottom-up decision-making now as opposed to when these guys were working back in the 60s, I think. But in the 21st century, that whole idea of bottom-up decision-making or decentralized decision-making has become a real component in artificial intelligence design.

38:40Because if you've listened to The End of the World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the hardest things in the world to do is program something to understand everything because you have to input all the stuff it needs to know. Whereas if you can just kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to let the machine think for itself, you finally got something. Yeah, and I would imagine, I didn't see this anywhere, but it seems like this might could have some applications in nanotechnology as well. Like the idea that we could program, you know, billions of tiny little nanobot bugs to clean the windows of your house every day.

39:17Nice. Like a lot of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Yeah. Am I off base there or could that potentially be a thing? Not at all. I think it totally could be a thing. It's anytime you have a huge amount of things that you're trying to all get to do roughly the same thing, but they need to not, you know, redouble their efforts or replicate their efforts. So you don't want one cleaning one part of the window and the other one coming over and cleaning the same part of the window that's already clean. All you have to do is figure out how to teach them. If this happens, do this. and if you can figure out how to strip it down to a basic enough algorithm that could conceivably be used for just about any situation, you've got the key to the universe in your hand.

40:09Like there's actually, we'll have to do an episode on it one day, but I read an article about a guy who was, I think he was a physicist back in the 80s, who was like, I think the universe is basically an operating system that goes down to two bits. You could say it's black and white, one or zero. It doesn't matter, but there are two kinds of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form, everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime mold. Everything comes out of these two types of bits that basically make up the fabric of space and time interacting with one another in increasingly sophisticated patterns.

40:52Wow. And that is exactly what you're talking about. So if we can figure out what that computation is, what those algorithms are that give rise to larger and larger stuff, you can do anything. It's weird. You can do increasingly sophisticated stuff the more basic your algorithm is. It's almost a paradox. Yeah. This is like Dr. Octagon stuff. Dr. Octagon? I don't know. Is that right? From Spider-Man? I don't. Yeah, he was Alfred Molina, you mean? Yeah. Sure. All right. I like Alfred Molina. I think he makes some really weird choices for parts. Oh, he's great. I'm sure if somebody's like, hey, we'll give you$10 million to play Dr.

41:37Octagon, I'd be like, sure, you got it. Where do I sign up? Yeah, I need to get him a movie crush because he actually is friends of the network. He's a friend of the network. I think he's been on the Daily Zeitgeist a few times. Oh, yeah. And, like, they booked him on some other comedy shows. I'm like, guys, throw a little Melina my way. For real? Get that Melina spread all over Movie Crush. You've been on Daily Zeitgeist twice. I've never been to have. I've been on Movie Crush once, too. I had Miles on Movie Crush the other day, and I was giving him a hard time because they haven't asked me on, and they've asked you on twice.

42:10That's hilarious. Keep it up, Chuck. Keep it up. He was like, no, man. I was like, Miles, that's cool. Did he really? You flustered him? I feel like he was on skates for a second there. That's hilarious. I let him off the hook. I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really going full court press here. Yeah, Miles is like, man, be on guard. Chuck does not pull punches. It's funny because Miles, as you know, is such a smart, smart guy. And just having a conversation with him is always amazing. And then he comes on and he picks Mallrats. What's his favorite movie? Was it really? That's his favorite movie of all time, huh?

42:46I mean, that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man, I never said I had good taste. Nice. It was pretty fun. Do you have any hints of what Jax is going to be? Well, I know it's Pulp Fiction because he had me save it like two years ago, and I just, you know, we kept slipping through the cracks. So he's going to come on next week for Pulp Fiction. Very nice. All right, so let's get back to, I mean, we talked about how the DD, as we're going to call it, moves around. Disco-ites. Yeah, without the pacemaker cells. But that original true slime mold, the big single-celled one that's just made up of all the goopy cytoplasm, we didn't really talk about what they do.

43:24And because if you don't have cell walls, you're like, well, how's this stuff moving around? It's actually made up of what's called oscillating units. And so these units oscillate at different frequencies, depending what's going on, like where they are, and then what their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so when they go close to food, they start oscillating and shaking like, hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food. And then that just sort of gets that flow. Everyone else starts oscillating in a similar manner. And that gets that flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction. Yeah, and so the slime mold effectively moves to the food because of that oscillating unit.

44:05That looks, again, like a fan spreading out, going to find food, and then finding it, the slime mold moves toward it. Or, like you said, away from something that they don't like. Yeah. Yes. Which is pretty neat. So those are the two things. It's moving toward food and moving away from something. And one of the things that they found is that slime mold can actually learn and not only learn to like stay away from something, it can actually teach other slime mold to stay away from it. even slime mold that's never been introduced to it. Or alternately, it can teach, this is really the sock garter fact, it can teach other slime mold that something that seems harmful is actually harmless.

44:52This is a pretty cool experiment. Yeah. So these researchers put slime molds, they built a little tiny bridge, it was very cute, and they coated this bridge in a noxious substance. It wasn't harmful to them. It was harmless. It was like salt or something, let's say. And then they put those little oat flakes on the other side as their ultimate temptation. And so these first slime molds start creeping up to it and sort of dipping their little toe in the water and saying, this stuff is pretty noxious. But then they learned, right, like, oh, okay, so it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.

45:31And what they found was that it learned to cross this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on. Right. So it said, okay, this stuff's fine. It tastes gross. It's way too salty, but it's not going to hurt me. So I'm going to get to food just as fast, right? That's pretty amazing in and of itself. But here's where it gets crazy. Yes, right. We need like a Ben or Matt or Noel to come in and say that. Yeah, totally. So they take the slime mold and break it apart and fuse it together with other slime molds that have never been exposed to this noxious stuff before.

46:09They're called naive and the other ones are called habituated. And those naive ones, when they encounter this noxious stuff like a salt bridge for the first time, they don't approach it with trepidation. They go right across it as fast as the habituated ones that it's fused to. Yeah. This is really weird because this is the first time this stuff's encountering it. And they think that somehow the habituated slime molds are passing on the information like, no, no, we know it's gross, but it's actually fine, to the naive slime molds. And they figured out, Chuck, that it doesn't matter if you take three habituated slime molds and fuse them with one naive slime mold or take three naive slime molds and just one habituated slime mold.

46:53It's going to approach this and move across it just as fast as in either situation. Yeah, and then they also sort of figured out how long this took. So the naive slime molds, they separated after an hour of fusion with those habituated, I'm going to call them in the no molds. Okay. And it forgot. It forgot that the coating was harmless and it sort of had to approach it with a little more trepidation. But if they had been fused for three hours or more and then separated, it remembered. I mean, technically you can't remember, but they do have this weird sort of memory that works. And I think they even figured out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave behind acts as sort of like a spatial memory because they come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already been here before me.

47:47Right. So there's no reason to go research this area because there clearly wasn't food there. Yeah. And again, here's your 10-minute reminder that slime mold don't have brains or neurons. So all of this is just astounding stuff that we're still trying to get to the bottom of. Like that habituation thing, they're like, we don't know. We have no idea. But we're going to go find out. And maybe in 10 years, we'll be able to explain it. Right. So eventually, you know, the people that are hip to the slime mold thing are like trying to spread the word and be like, this stuff is really amazing. They're doing TED Talks on it.

48:27It was a really good TED Talk on it, in fact. And some coders said, hey, wait a minute. You know, they're doing all this amazing stuff like the overlay of the Tokyo subway, and it's lining up perfectly. What if we actually generated code of the slime mold and kind of reverse engineered it and we could see what that looked like and how we could use it? so yeah this one artist named sage jensen basically figured out um or took i i don't know exactly who figured out exactly what the the slime molds um algorithms were but somebody wrote them down and sage jensen came along and turned them into c plus plus code and basically ran these things.

49:12It's like algorithms and found that these fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold moving across a Petri dish in search of food, which is pretty cool in and of itself. It was an art project basically. But someone on a team of astrophysicists heard about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when they were stumped trying to figure out how to map the invisible matter that makes up basically the structure of our universe. That if we can just crack that nut, we'll understand the universe exponentially better than we do now. But we cannot figure out how to do it. And so just like with the ancient roads between the Roman cities or the Tokyo subway map, someone figured out to use slime mold to basically try to create the structure of the universe, These invisible filaments.

50:10Yeah, these filaments that came out of the Big Bang. So I guess they went back to Sage Jensen and said, first of all, Sage, you use C++ code. Isn't it really just B minus code, if we're being honest? And he said, that's not how it works. Get out of my office. That was a great coding joke. Thank you. It's my only coding joke. And I just made it up. It's the only coding joke, I think. No, I think it's not a bug. It's a feature. Isn't that one of the things? Oh, that's true. True that. Old-timey. So, yeah, they went to Sage and they said, you're an artist, but this is pretty amazing. I think we can apply it here.

50:48And they modified it. And what they did was, and of course, there's always oats involved. They put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells, and they put it on a map with 37 ,000 real galaxies. and they used, I guess, virtual piles of food to represent the galaxies. And the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the pile of food. And so they did this modeling through the coding and had the virtual slime mold seek out the most efficient way to reach this. And I guess in theory, they're hoping that they get a sort of map of the universe out of it. Yeah. So when the slime mold was finished, they all stood back around.

51:29That's amazing. How accurate is it? And they all just realized that they had no idea how to verify it. But no, surely, like, I think what they're doing is they're taking this as an initial, you know, guide, and then they'll go back and try to figure out how to verify it. And maybe the slime mold did figure out the most efficient way to link together these galaxies. But that would be, I can't even put a word on that, of how impressive that would be if the slime mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together, the structure of it, you know? What if slime mold is God? What if we're asleep right now and this is all just one dream, Chuck?

52:12The other cool thing they figured out with the slime mold moving around is when they were researching them, they found that those mazes that they were running them through, they went even faster through the maze when they had some sort of noise, like a bright light or something. Like we said, they like to go away from things they don't like. And that negative input of that light basically made them say, all right, let's pick up the pace and make these decisions quicker and get to that food. Stop futzing around. I don't like this light staring at me. I think we kind of blew some minds today. I think so.

52:44My mind's definitely been blown. Did you want to cover the Amazon thing? Nope. Okay, good. That's it for Slime Oldness. You got anything else right now, do you? I got nothing else. We'll have to revisit this in 10 years. And thanks to Dave Ruse for helping us with this one. And since I said Dave Ruse, I think, Chuck, it means it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. I'm going to call this Night Trap response. I just laugh every time I hear those words together. I know. Night Trap. This is from Aaron. And hey, guys, just finished the Night Trap video game show. Thanks for bringing it to everyone.

53:21I own the 25th Anniversary Edition. Like you said, it's not a good game, but has its moments. One other game worth noting is called Double Switch. It's of the same style and video camera control quality, and it starred Corey Haim. Perhaps arguably a little better game, but still had the same thing going on, really. I'm sure your research finds lots of things that don't quite make it to the final show. Aaron, we did not know about Double Switch, so nice work there. Yeah. And Aaron says, I've listened to so many shows, I feel that Chuck and I are some sort of long lost brother separated at birth.

53:53I generally agree with just about everything he says. I'm always fully entertained. It would be nice to meet you guys if you ever get another tour started and make it back to Michigan. Keep up the good work. I'll finish your book. And I have the pre-order poster in my office. Very nice. And I've converted friends and family. So that is from Aaron in Michigan. And we're definitely going to start touring again. And I would say probably next year, although we haven't really talked much about it. No, but we need to. It's definitely starting to get to be time to get talking, I guess. Although, I've got to admit, I have not missed the traveling.

54:27I've missed being on stage, but not the traveling part. Well, you know, that's what they say. That's what rock stars say. It's not the heat. It's the humidity. No, they say, you know, you get paid to travel. You don't get paid to play shows. I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense. Yeah. If you can figure out how to get paid for both, then you're really doing something right. Good stuff, yeah. And if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit. We've had a lot of calls over the year for Ann Arbor, so maybe that's where we go. Yes. Well, who was that again? Aaron. Aaron, that's what I was going to guess.

55:04Thanks a lot, Aaron. That was a great email. Thanks for the Corey Haim reference and all that stuff. And if you want to get in touch with us like Aaron did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

55:41We've got your back. Prices, they're still high. And the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah, each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

56:12Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health Stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name.

56:52Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.