I've seen things like this a few times now and I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. The scientist makes a large petri-dish-type tray that they've shaped like this or that nation and then places bits of slime mold food at the locations that would mark the population centers of that nation on their geographically-shaped petri-dish-type tray. Then they seed the place with slime mold and film the result and play it back as a time-lapse video and expect the audience to be amazed that the resulting routes that the slime molds take to the different population centers are "astonishingly" similar to the road and freeway networks that the humans have worked out to their corresponding cities. The accompanying commentary/paper/article/write-up yaps about how this represents something significant about the elegantly organic nature of the development of transportation infrastructure or the intelligence of slime molds or something or other. But I'm simply not that impressed. I've not read the papers so maybe I've missed where they might have actually performed a geospatial analysis to see how closely the slime-mold and human networks actually correspond (though I doubt it). But I can't imagine that there's actually that much statistical correlation. The humans largely build straight-line routes from city to city with the variations-from-straight happening because of geomorphology and connectivity to minor centers of commerce. The slime-molds can't go in straight lines, but they do figure out where the nearby food sources are and head towards them fairly efficiently, which is more-or-less straight-liney. What's the big deal? It makes for a reasonably adequate excuse to put some time-lapse video to a soundtrack. But more than that I find nothing very profound. Anyway, there's actually quite a number of these things out there so enjoy and do let me know if you think I'm missing something deeper.... or if you find any more nations represented.... or if you do one yourself.
USA:
Canada:
Tokyo rail system:
The Netherlands:
The Iberian Peninsula:
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