Kind: captions
Language: en
meet the slime mold ferum
polyam it looks kind of like a fungus
but it's actually a single- celled life
form known as a
protest the thing about fizeram is that
it doesn't have a brain or even a
nervous system but nevertheless it can
make surprisingly sophisticated
decisions
for example slime moldts can find the
shortest route through a maze toward a
piece of food first the slime mold
extends its tendrils through every
Corridor essentially mapping the entire
maze it then retracts every tendril that
didn't find food leaving behind a trail
of slime that acts as a kind of external
memory the trail reminds the slime mold
that certain corridors are dead ends it
avoids these areas and grows exclusively
along the shortest path from the
beginning of the maze to the tasty DET
treat but that's not all after
scientists placed food in the relative
position of major cities and urban areas
slime molds accurately recreated the
rail system of Tokyo and the major
roadways of England Canada Spain and
Portugal in other words this one cell
solved a real world problem that it took
teams of Engineers to figure out this
might not sound like rocket science but
these experiments are just the beginning
researchers are discovering in more
examples of fiz aram's slimy smarts all
the time and this single celled organism
is proving that complex decision making
doesn't require a big brain in fact it
doesn't require a brain at all
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