Report on the art work from cover of magazine for this issue.

Open access, freely available online T here is an old Chinese curse: 'May you live in interesting times.' According to those who know about such things, we live in a momentous time, the time of the Sixth Mass Extinction! But most of us do not feel at all cursed. Because, in fact, the Sixth is quite different to the previous Big Five—no-one would notice this one if we were not repeatedly reminde...

In laboratory experiments we demonstrate that protoplasmic tubes of acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum show current versus voltage profiles consistent with memristive systems and that the effect is due to the living protoplasm of the mould. This complements previous findings on memristive properties of other living systems (human skin and blood) and contributes to development of self-g...

This video is composed of a sequence of films created by John Tyler Bonner [5] in the 1940s to show the life cycle of the cellular slime mold [6], Dictyostelium discoideum . As only the second person to study slime molds, Bonner frequently encountered audiences who had never heard of, let alone seen, the unusual organism. He therefore decided to create a film to present at seminars in order to ...

The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum reacts to direct current by migration toward the cathode. Cathodal migration was obtained upon a variety of substrata such as baked clay, paper, cellophane, and agar with a current density in the substratum of 1.0 microa./mm.(2) Injury was produced by current densities of 8.0 to 12.0 microa./mm.(2) The negative galvanotactic response was not due to electr...

This paper describes the biological motivation, design and testing of a novel obstacle sensor system based on the chemical sounding mechanism observed in slime molds. The sensor system emits a volatile sounding chemical and adjacent obstacles reduce the dispersion of the chemical. The resulting increase in chemical concentration is detected and interpreted as indicating an obstacle. To demonstr...

In this paper we use the di usion-limit expansion of transport equations developed earlier [23] to study the limiting equation under a variety of external biases imposed on the motion. When applied to chemotaxis or chemokinesis, these biases produce modi cation of the turning rate, the movement speed or the preferred direction of movement. Depending on the strength of the bias, it leads to anis...