This trendy "pet" actually solved the problem of the railway network that humans spent hundreds of years planning and designing!

Edit: April

One day

My colleague asked me mysteriously

Do you know what this is?

I said:

Like a mutated piece of chewing gum

Colleagues said:

Hey, it's a pet.

......

Are you in front of the computer?

I have a lot of questions just like me.

That's right

It is the currently popular pet - slime mold

Despite its name, slime mold is not a fungus.

Slime mold is neither a fungus nor a bacterium, but a non-toxic and harmless organism belonging to the class Myxomycetes, the domain of eukaryotes. Its life cycle has two stages: the nutritional stage and the reproductive stage.

Wang Qi, a professor of mycology at Jilin Agricultural University, said that the nutritional stage is called protoplasm, which grows mainly in dark and humid environments. It will continue to split into branches and move to find food. When conditions are suitable, the slime mold will enter the reproduction stage.

So far, more than 1,000 species of slime molds have been discovered around the world. The individual forms of slime molds are diverse, such as hair-like hair net fungi, snake-like snake-shaped half net fungi, and wine glass-shaped high cup fungi. Common slime molds in life include gray group net fungi, dark red group net fungi, lantern fungi, and powder tumor fungi. Slime molds are omnivorous and generally do not actively cause harm to the human body, but it is still necessary to keep the breeding environment clean and avoid breeding in a heavily polluted environment. When raising slime molds, you should also pay attention to personal hygiene, avoid direct contact with the mouth, nose, eyes and other parts, and wash your hands after contact .

Slime mold may seem ordinary, but it has solved the problem of the railway network that humans have spent hundreds of years planning and designing.

Slime molds can start from a point and stretch out in all directions to look for food. Once a food source is found, those "tentacles" that have not found food will shrink and disappear. In the end, only those lines and nodes that have food supply and can effectively transfer nutrients are left in the slime mold's foraging network.

Slime mold can even find the shortest path out of a maze.

In 2010, Atsushi Tero, a scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan, and his colleagues published a study in the journal Science, in which they successfully used oatmeal to replace a city, allowing slime mold to draw a route map of Tokyo's railway system in a petri dish.

What is surprising is that the Tokyo railway system drawn by slime mold is almost identical to the railway network that humans have built diligently through trial and error over the past hundred years.

Slime mold designed it in just a few days and some oatmeal ≈ it took humans 100 years and a lot of money to design it

Since then, many scientists doing research on transportation network optimization have begun to apply slime mold to design transportation networks.

There are many advantages to using slime molds to help humans plan space design, such as fast speed, low cost, and easy operation. Slime molds grow outwards at an average of 1 cm per hour. In just a few days, they can solve optimization solutions that humans would take years or even decades to find through practice or with the help of supercomputers.

In addition, Wang Qi, a professor of mycology at Jilin Agricultural University, also said , "Slime molds and their metabolites contain a variety of active ingredients, such as fatty acids, amino acids, alkaloids, aromatic compounds, and terpenoids, which have antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-cytotoxic and antioxidant effects. Taking Physarum polycephalum as an example, the cyclophosphatidic acid (CPA) isolated from it can inhibit the invasion and metastasis of cancer cells, while polymalic acid (PMLA) shows targeting and high efficiency against human breast cancer cells. At present, it has been successfully applied to medical research in drug delivery systems and bioimaging for cancer treatment, and has great potential for clinical application . Young people who raise slime molds can learn the basic knowledge about biodiversity and ecosystems, and let more people know about the edible and medicinal value of slime molds."

Slime molds are favored by scientists and artists for their unique growth methods and bizarre shapes.

By observing the growth process of slime mold , scientists and artists incorporate their own insights as well as the unique form and growth patterns of slime mold into their paintings, forming a series of unique slime mold paintings.

Ernst Haeckel, a modern German biologist and artist, drew an exquisite illustration of slime mold in his "Artistic Forms of Nature" published in the late 19th century.

Japanese microbiologist Yoshikazu Emoto also showed a large number of exquisite slime mold illustrations in his book "Color Atlas of Proteobacteria in Japan", magnifying some slime mold forms that are almost invisible to the naked eye hundreds of times and presenting them in his pen.

There is another artist who is also very good at using slime molds in "paintings", except that the canvas is a colorful petri dish. Russian artist Dasha Plesen is a microbe enthusiast. She collects spores from the air, the surrounding environment, personal items, pets, cars, subways, ashes, churches, body skin, antiques and other surfaces, uses the culture medium as food for the canvas and spores , and waits for the spores to grow naturally. These slime mold spores and microorganisms such as molds and bacteria produce natural color combinations during the growth process.

If you really want to grow slime mold

You should know some knowledge about slime mold selection in advance:

↓↓↓

1. If you do not have sufficient knowledge about slime molds, it is not recommended to collect them yourself to avoid damaging the environment or affecting your health.

2. Pay attention to cleaning to prevent escaped slime mold from successfully surviving and polluting the environment.

3. Slime molds are relatively easy to raise. Most slime molds are saprophytes and are not very picky about what they eat. They can usually be fed with crushed oatmeal.

4. Feed them regularly and in a timely manner. If you do not give your slime molds enough food, they may crawl out of the culture medium and occupy your table or windowsill.

5. Slime molds may be contaminated by molds and even die. This must also be dealt with to avoid any impact on human health.

6. Slime molds produce spores during the reproduction process . If inhaled by the human body, they may cause allergic reactions and other adverse reactions .

In short, when it comes to raising slime mold, you can try it but you must also be serious and cautious.
at last

I asked on behalf of some curious friends

Is slime mold edible?

Reference sources: China National Radio, People's Daily Health Client, AS Science and Art Research Center, Guangming Online, Bring Science Home