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Experiments
I’ve been trying to understand what’s good and what’s not so suitable for the growth of physarum polycephalum. I’ve been facing some issues during this strange ”relationship". The first intriguing thing the physarum did was when it “crawled” out of the petri dishes and connected to each other on my desk.
After witnessing this process I started isolating them and put most of them in a cardboard box. Then the same happened. After that I tried to feed them with leaves that fell off one of my plants after moving to Weimar. First, it was curious to see what it was but immediately stepped back from it. After that I fed it again with oats, but unfortunately they all got contaminated and either formed spores or mold.
Another experiment was to see how the physarum conducts electricity. There were two problems I have been facing. One was that the voltage it conducted was in a range of millivolts. Second, the agar medium was also a good conductor, so my measurements were not very precise at that stage. Therefore, I transferred the to the cardboard to do experiments, but eventually they all „died“.
telecommunication between two physarum
In this experiment, I want to find a way to let two physarums interact through electronic devices. Two physarums will be in separate containers, the only connection will be through two ESP32s that will capture and transmit the state or other indicators to the other one.
time lapse
Project
Rewarding system for physarum
In my project I will be assessing physarum polycephalum to be used as a sensor. Every organism that contains water and minerals can be used as an electrical conductor and so does it work with physarum. Moreover, the behaviour of the slime mold will be captured through sensors to get a better understanding of it. After doing some experiments and understanding the organism better, the live captured data will be used to trigger something and kind of reward the slime mold to see how it reacts to it.