This Brainless Organism is Mapping Dark Matter

The food-seeking behavior of slime mold is helping astronomers map dark matter…here’s how. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com Scientists are trying to map the shape of the largest thing in the universe, and as you might expect, it’s proved challenging. So in an attempt to speed up the process researchers are turning to slime mold. Now you might be asking, "what even is the cosmic web?” The cosmic web is a large, mysterious network of interconnected filaments made up of dark matter and gas—these filaments connect galaxies, operating as the scaffolding of the universe. And as we’ve mentioned, the cosmic web is incredibly hard to map. So a team at the University of California Santa Cruz sifted through enormous amounts of archived data and then used an algorithm inspired by the slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Find out more about how these researchers are using slime mold to map dark matter and what this could mean for our future understanding of the cosmic web and the intricacies of the entire universe. #darkmatter #slime #cosmicmap #astronomy #science #space #seeker #elements What Has No Brain, 720 Sexes, And the Ability to Self-Heal?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZhc8R58R7k Read More: Slime Mold Simulations Used to Map Dark Matter Holding Universe Together https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/slime-mold-simulations-used-to-map-dark-matter-holding-universe-together/ "The behavior of one of nature's humblest creatures is helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the universe." Modeling the Universe with Slime Mold https://medium.com/the-cosmic-companion/modeling-the-universe-with-slime-mold-63f69c7f6a28 Wherever the slime mold model predicted a ribbon would form, researchers found gas. These deposits were more concentrated near their centers, as predicted by models. Where gas was most concentrated, the signal dropp