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Robotic Mold
Canis Lupus writes to mention that researchers from the University of West England are designing the world's first biological robot, constructed from mold. The robot, "Plasmobot," will be created using vegetative slime mold called plasmodium (Physarum polycephalum) that is commonly found in forests, gardens, and most damp places in the UK. "This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."
Adamatzky I'm already familiar with, citing his Chemical Computer in a senior paper to finish my CS degree. This is no more crazy than using electrostatic foam to compute.
Exactly. In fact, plasmodium does not compute optimal distances, it has no senses to detect objects at a distance. It detects chemical concentration gradients and moves to or from higher concentrations of chemicals it likes or dislikes. It does not compute. In fact, if you've ever seen one move, it wriggles around a lot. It has to, in order to detect its immediate environment.
What is the point of this article?
In his Ware Trilogy
Yeah, the reason slime molds are referred to as plasmodium is because the slime mold colony lacks defined cell walls or membranes between what would normally be considered individual cells. The mold can essentially be thought of as a single cell with many nuclei, since cytoplasm is continous throughout the entire colony. As the parent notes, this type of structure (a lifecycle stage, really) has nothing to do with the protozoa which cause malaria, which just happen to be of genus Plasmodium.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
No, this sounds like it's a normal mold.
Hmmm, this tastes like slime mold juice.
In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.
Not _any_ slime mold. Plasmodial slime molds are one small grouping of slime molds.
Dictyostelids, for instance, are unicellular slime molds. Plasmodiums have many (often millions) nuclei in one cell membrane. Dictyostelids maintain cellular structure--their macroscopic form is not a plasmodium, though they do form a "pseudoplasmodium" that kind of looks like a plasmodium.
And that's just the plasmodials and the dictyostelids, two kinds of slime molds in the Amoebozoa kingdom--there are 3 other kingdoms that contain other kinds of slime molds, many with macroscopic forms that are not plasmodiums.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It's not really much different from that, which is exactly why it is interesting! Natural phenomena solve some of the hardest problems in computation, just by doing what they normally do.
The trick is controlling that process to get it to solve things we are interested in.
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