Slime mould is quitethe animate being . It has no mentality and yet it can spread and hunt for food . It is made of a collection of unicellular organisms that , if write out , will flux back together . If this was n’t over-the-top enough , now guck mold is aid cosmologists understand the universe .
Slime mold builds complex filamentary networks to seek out food using near - optimal paths . Cosmologists have found that these structures are fabulously standardised to the cosmic web , the expected distribution of dingy and regular matter in the universe . The work is published inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters .
Galaxies are usually found at the nodes of the cosmic vane , and filaments have been traced and study over the last few decades . The principal proceeds is that they are made of dark matter and gas so diffuse that it might as well be invisible . understand the full construction is unmanageable enough , and when survey of tens of thousands of galaxies are considered , the task becomes even more so .
This is where muck mold comes into play . Simulations based on ooze mold behavior allowed the research worker to determine how the filaments of the cosmic web should spread from one extragalactic nebula to the next .
" It ’s really fascinating that one of the simplest forms of life-time actually enables perceptiveness into the very largest - scale complex body part in the universe , " chair researcher Joseph Burchett of the University of California Santa Cruz , enjoin in astatement . " By using the ooze - mold simulation to find the location of the cosmic web filament , include those far from galaxies , we could then habituate the Hubble Space Telescope ’s archival information to detect and check the density of the cool gas pedal on the very outskirts of those invisible filum . scientist have detected signature of this gas for several decade , and we have proven the theoretical arithmetic mean that this natural gas comprises the cosmic web . "
The idea came to squad phallus Oskar Elek , a computational medium scientist at UC Santa Cruz , after he found the work of Sage Jenson , a Berlin - base media artist , on slime mould . Jenson based his digital oeuvre on an algorithm that simulates how slime mould grow , and Elek develop a 3D version that can be applied to galaxies .
By looking at the distribution of coltsfoot , human eyes can almost see how the web should be shaped , but algorithmic rule so far have required a lot of effort to come close to that . The muck mold simulation does this body of work in minutes . As more and more view measure the length and position of more and more galaxies , an approach like this will be even more useful .
