slime mold

[miriam_e]

When I was a kid I used to love reading C. L. Stong's column, The Amateur Scientist, in Scientific American each month. One of my all-time favorites was the one about slime molds. I'd told my nephew about them a short time ago, and realised that these things are so damn weird that my explanation sounded fictional. They have features of animals and of plants. Sometimes they act like single-celled organisms, and other times like multicellular ones. They are very common, but hardly anyone knows about them.

Then the other day, after a short search through my stacks I found the issue of Scientific American containing the article -- January 1966. What surprised me was how much I'd forgotten; slime molds are even more bizarre than I remembered.

Nowadays you can't see this wonderful information for love or money anymore, so I lovingly converted it and present it here for your viewing pleasure.

Probably the weirdest living things you'll ever encounter: slime molds.

Comments

[blackgrrr.livejournal.com]

I was only expecting a pdf.

. The other items needed for doing the experiment are a sterilized medicine dropper, a quarter-inch loop of fine wire supported at the end of a pencil-sized piece of wood, a pair of tweezers, Vaseline, a 70 percent solution of isopropyl alcohol and a gas burner or an alcohol lamp.

Who has that in their house? Who?

(and, purely because that reminded me of this:http://xkcd.com/576/)

Re: Big so often bad....

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'll never send anybody a pdf, unless it is specifically for printing only, and even then it is unlikely. I detest that format. It is good only for paper -- a terrible format to use in an age of electronic information. </rant>

xkcd is neat. I check it all too rarely.

[qu-is.livejournal.com]

that's awesome. I love old things like that. Slime moulds were briefly mentioned in 1st year biology as an example of the limits of categorisation, and i love the old 'do at home' with equipment that i really do wish i had just laying around. (like blackgrr said) :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the old Amateur Scientist series was wonderful. Making a particle accelerator, a gas laser, a pill-sized temperature-sensitive radio transmitter for recording the temperature of your intestinal tract, building your own simple field-effect transistor, and many, many more fun projects.

Sometimes their projects required unusual materials, but just as often they used ordinary glass jars, bits of plastic tubing, and so on. A lot of times you could happily substitute stuff you do have for the stuff you don't. We frequently forget how much landmark science was done with simple home-made devices. Ernest Rutherford did much of his groundbreaking subatomic research with equipment he built from ordinary plumbing supplies. A lot of complex, expensive laboratory equipment can be replaced with simple stuff from around the home. I didn't comment on blackgrr's point about availability of materials because I wasn't sure whether it was tongue in cheek or not.

• sterilized medicine dropper - most people have an old empty or almost empty one lying around, and they are very cheap at the chemists (drugstores), even so, an ordinary teaspoon can be substituted for dispensing drops
  
• a quarter-inch loop of fine wire supported at the end of a pencil-sized piece of wood - get an old bit of wire by snipping off some dead headphones' cord or any such cord, stripping off an inch of insulation, and teasing out one of the fine strands, and the pencil-sized piece of wood can be a pencil with the wire held to it with sticky tape
  
• a pair of tweezers - everybody has these, and they are cheap at supermarkets
  
• Vaseline - cheap at any supermarket
  
• 70 percent solution of isopropyl alcohol - isopropyl alcohol is rubbing alcohol and available at most supermarkets at about 70% strength, but ethyl alcohol would probably work (vodka or gin for instance)
  
• a gas burner or an alcohol lamp - I'd use a candle, though would need to be careful not to cover it in soot. Another possibility would be to swab the slide in hydrogen peroxide because it is a very effective sterilising cleaner.

I had a very inspirational science teacher when I was a kid who told me that he always carried string, chewing gum, and sticky tape in his pocket because they were so useful. I try to have clothespegs, wire paperclips, and wire coat-hangers always handy because they're such damn good tools.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'll try to make time to post more of my favorite old Amateur Scientist articles in the future. And some of my favorite Mathematical games articles too -- they were often just as cool (one of my favorites used spaghetti to solve a computer problem instead of using a computer).