Article - Better transit design through...slime mold?

Link - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34980542/ns/technology_and_science-scie...

By Clara Moskowitz
1/21/2010

Since the best city planners around the world have not been able to end traffic jams, scientists are looking to a new group of experts: slime mold.

That's right, a species of gelatinous amoeba could help urban planners design better road systems to reduce traffic congestion, a new study found.

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.

Slime mold is a funguslike, single-celled animal that can grow in a network of linked veins, spreading over a surface like a web. The mold expands by dividing its nuclei into more and more nuclei, though all are technically enclosed in one large cell.

"Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources," the researchers wrote in a paper published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Slime mold has evolved to grow in the most efficient way possible to maximize its access to nutrients.

The research team, led by Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan, said the mold "can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length, yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources."
The 2010 Weird Science Awards

To test whether slime-mold networks behave anything like train and car traffic networks, the researchers placed oat flakes in various spots on a wet surface so that the resulting layout corresponded to the cities surrounding Tokyo. They even added areas of bright light (which slime mold tends to avoid) to correspond to mountains or other geologic features that the trains would have to steer around.