Id Nobel Prize for slime mould

CABDyN's Ban Bebber and Mark Fricker attended the ceremony for the 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes at Harvard.  Their award is for the work presented in an article on "Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network designs", that was published in Science in January 2010 (see previous news story here). Their research, in collaboration with Japanese colleagues, shows that surprisingly enough slime moulds are able to replicate the topology of the Tokyo rail network - a system that would appear to require high levels of planning and intelligence.  In an interview for the Oxford Science Blog (see here), Mark Fricker explains why the Ig Nobels are good vehicles for popularising science, and why we should pay attention to how slime moulds build networks.

18 October 2010