Who writes this
The pages on blob-info.com are written by Josselin. I am not a biologist or a researcher: I am a writer, and this site is documentation and science communication, not a primary source.
The site is published by SASU VALIC, whose full details appear in the legal notice.
That distinction matters, and I would rather state it up front than imply a scientific authority I do not have. Everything here comes from published work by named researchers and laboratories, referenced at the foot of the relevant pages.
Where the information comes from
Slime mold has the convenient property of being unusually well documented. The landmark work is public, recent and checkable. The main sources used across this site are:
- Toshiyuki Nakagaki (Hokkaido University) for the maze-solving experiments published in Nature in 2000, extended in Science in 2010 with Atsushi Tero on modelling the Tokyo rail network.
- Audrey Dussutour (CNRS, Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Toulouse) for habituation, memory, and its transfer through cell fusion.
- Andrew Adamatzky (University of the West of England) for unconventional computing and Physarum-based circuits.
- Publications from CNES and the ESA for the "Blob" experiment run aboard the International Space Station in 2021.
- Taxonomic literature on myxomycetes for anything touching classification and related species.
How pages are written
Three rules, applied consistently.
- Every number has a source. A growth rate, an optimal temperature, a count of mating types: each figure on this site comes from a publication rather than from another website. Where studies disagree, the page says so instead of picking one arbitrarily.
- What is known, and what is inferred. Slime mold attracts spectacular claims. Some are demonstrated, others are interpretation. Pages separate the two explicitly, particularly around "consciousness" and "intelligence", where everyday vocabulary misleads easily.
- Protocols are testable. The practical pages describe procedures you can actually run with ordinary equipment, with real timings and conditions, including the unglamorous ones.
Corrections
If you spot an error, particularly on a figure or an attribution, it will be corrected. The update date shown at the top of each page reflects a real change to its content, never an automatic refresh.
The site
blob-info.com is available in French and English. The two versions are written separately and are not machine translations of each other.
The site is funded by advertising. This has no bearing on the content: no page is sponsored, and the supplier suggestions in where to buy slime mold involve no commercial arrangement.
Legal information is in the legal notice, and data handling in the privacy policy.