I felt overworked from a postdoctoral grant application submitted this week. So on Friday I rewarded myself: fired up my raspberry pi 2 and started tinkering with shooting Physarum.
Category Archives: Hacks
How fast time (and slime mold) can pass by
I try to cultivate slime mold by regularly transferring small pieces of it in new plastic containers, hoping it will extend its plasmodial network all over the new dishes. However, not even 24 hours after the inoculation has been done, I’m puzzled to see only a small area of the dish visibly populated by the …
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Slime Mold Escape Artistry
Oat flakes are commonly fed to Physarum to act as chemoattractants and orient the critter’s growth. They’re also the main food sources employed in the making of living wires.
A 24 Hour Connection
Update on the previous post: yes, putting a small piece of wet (white) paper towel in the petri dish does increase humidity and growth rate. In not even 24 hours, one of the four plates I had prepared made a nice connection between the electrodes. The other three slime mold blobs on other plates are …
How to make slime mold wire plates
The previous post introduced the idea of “desiccation shock” through Martin Grube’s contributed chapter in Advances in Physarum Machines (2016). I made slightly modified plates, with small bands of aluminum conductive tape protruding from the sides of the petri dishes to easily get a hold of them with alligator clips. Here’s a quick run through of what …