Slime moulds may rule us

摘要

FOR the first time, non-human researchers have issued policy advice on everything from the proposed border wall between the US and Mexico to the correlation between environmental hardship and material affluence. The Plasmodium Consortium at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, is a policy research institute composed of "visiting non-human scholars" -members of the species Physarum polycephalum, one of the more common types of slime mould. A minor celebrity in philosophical circles, slime moulds are neither unicellular nor multicellular, but something in between.