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.