26 November 2011

Slime mold

This one is Stemonitis fusca.

With a hat tip to The Outer Hoard for the link to a NYT article on the evolution of slime molds.  (See also pix here, and this re their reputed "intelligence.")


Photo credit Nick Cantle, via Ursa Major and A London Salmagundi.

4 comments:

  1. Oh, yeah! Those grow in my refrigerator. Delicious with a dab of Ranch Dressing.

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  2. Just looked at my blog stats and was surprised to see (so far) twenty incoming visits from TYWKIWDBI...

    I would have got the slime mould link via Ed Yong's blog, originally.

    I think I first became intrigued by slime moulds when I was researching for the science history trivia quiz I compiled almost two years ago, and learned about the maze-solving experiment from 2000 (as mentioned in the article and also featured in my quiz).

    (Incidentally, I've just given away one of the fifty answers in the quiz, should you care to try it...)

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  3. I didn't see the via for the Rocket Science source, but I don't think Ed will mind.

    I actually did try your quiz a couple days ago and found it to be just a bit too hard for me (and frankly a little cumbersome in the format - I wish it could have been a drag-and-drop to arrange the items in order or something other than the drop-down menus, which meant I had to rejigger multiple answers when I had a duplication).

    But it's a good quiz - just too challenging for an old English major...

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  4. I generally don't record where I get links from; it's not important in my opinion, and it would be cumbersome to tag everything with that information. (I'll sometimes make exceptions at my discretion, say if the source is a little-known blog that I think deserves a shout-out.)

    As for the quiz, bear in mind it was designed to be answered by teams rather than individuals. It's unlikely that any one person will score well, but a small group of people, each bringing a little knowledge from different fields, has a much better chance.

    And the reason the online version doesn't have a drag-and-drop interface is that I don't know how! :-)

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