Better Transit Design Through Slime Mold

by Nathan Walpow

How can you not like a headline like that? How can you not like anything about slime mold? From MSNBC:

A team of researchers studied the slime mold species Physarum polycephalum and found that as it grows it connects itself to scattered food crumbs in a design that’s nearly identical to Tokyo’s rail system.

That's right. What we knew as kids as the biggest one-celled organism (though it appears the biology is way more complicated than that) is going into transportation planning. Think of the money you can save on consultants. All slime mold needs is some rotting vegetable matter, and it'll happily lay out routes 24 hours a day.

And can you imagine the movie in this? Transporton the Magnificent. First he designs your train system, then he absorbs it.

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