4

Superintelligent Slime

Wired Science

The engineers have their tools, their instruments, their will and their expertise. All they need now is their orders. And for that, they must consult the Grand Slime Mold, primal biocomputing Lord of Travel.

It sounds like the kind of genre fiction you'd only find in weathered old boxes underneath the shittier tables at the flea market, but it's totally real. Japanese scientists had a theory: What if slime molds are, like, really good city planners, and the only reason we don't know is because we never thought to ask? They tested this bizarre hypothesis by setting out oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities, with Tokyo at the center, and then letting loose a yellow slime mold called Physarum polycephalum. The slime immediately started branching out and surrounding its food sources with "tunnels" to ferry nutrients back and forth, which was par for the sticky course: That's just how slime molds do when they do what they do. But then something surprising started happening: Some of the tunnels -- ones that seemed to make sense at first glance -- began to collapse or retract, while other, more obscure paths strengthened and cemented. When the dust settled and the slime had finished its "railway between the cities," the scientists were vindicated: Slime mold is indeed an excellent city planner. Its system was nearly identical to the existing Tokyo railways.

The ones it took mankind decades of trial and error to build and refine.

The slime mold did it in under a day.

Wired Science
"Welp, solved all your complex commuting problems. Now: MORE OATS FOR THE SLIME LORD!"

3

Ratborgs

Red Ice Creations

We've already started building functional artificial brains, just like in The Matrix or Johnny Mnemonic or -- wait, Keanu Reeves sure has done a lot of movies with artificial brains, hasn't he? We'd make a joke about that -- probably something about his dull-eyed stare and exhaustive mastery of synonyms for "whoa" -- but we're just a little too terrified for proper comedy right now. Because those artificial brains aren't being used to augment humanity ...

They're being plugged into rats.

Scientists at Tel Aviv University have successfully created a synthetic cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls timing and movement. The implant receives sensory input from the brainstem, interprets it, then relays signals to other regions of the brain, which they then execute. The researchers take it as "proof of concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it ... and return it." In other words, we can hand certain mental tasks over to computers now; it is a matter of scant years before we're all jacking prelearned languages into our brain to free up more time for jacking other things.

The Tel Aviv experiment consisted of anesthetizing a rat and disconnecting its cerebellum, then blowing air at its eyes while playing a tone, which caused the animal to blink. Eventually, the rat learned to blink at just the tone alone -- you know, kind of like what Pavlov did (he was the guy who built that robot dog that ironically destroyed humanity with its own hubris, right?). With its own cerebellum disconnected, the rat could not learn this process. With the artificial one connected, it learned just as it normally would have.

Red Ice Creations
Hey, here's Science, augmenting the brains of stupid things again like it learned nothing at all from Lawnmower Man.

2

Super Monkeys

Getty

Hey, you know how every time you go to the zoo, the only thing you can think about is how great it would be if monkeys could jump like kangaroos? No?

Shit, Science is the only one that thinks that? Weird.

Oh well, they went ahead and made Monkey-roos a reality anyway (you're welcome, children's cartoons and bestiality enthusiasts looking for a challenge): Scientists at the Nationwide Children's Hospital have successfully used gene therapy to augment the amount of follistatin in the leg muscles of monkeys. Follistatin is what's known as a "myostatin blocker" in the chemistry world. Myostatin is what's known as a "decreased muscle mass protein" in the weightlifting world. Blocking this process in monkeys, thereby giving them super strong legs, is what's known as a "dick move" in the "I was hoping they couldn't get me on top of this building" world.

Johns Hopkins, via ScienceDaily
Here's what the results of this process look like in mice, in case you were foolishly thinking you could "take" our new supermonkey masters ...

1

Monkeybots

Phys.Org

You'd roll your eyes if your spastic little brother said it: Monkey Robots!

Yep, really funny putting random words together, Billy. Good work, but don't quit your day job eating crayons, buddy.

Well, don't you look like an asshole? Turns out, little Billy was a futurist, just trying to warn us all of our impending doom. Behold, the dawn of the Monkey-bots!

So what the hell are you looking at here? That's a monkey with its arms restrained, mentally controlling a robotic arm in order to feed itself. How the hell did they do that? Well, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh first designed the highly complex robot arms with seven points of articulation, and then implanted sensors in the monkey's hand and motor cortex to control it. Why the hell would they do that? Because shit, son, even scientists like to get a little high sometimes.

You know what? I take it all back, Science. You were right: This was a damn fine idea. I mean sure, maybe we shouldn't be artificially augmenting similar-but-lesser species for our own amusement if we want to retain our positions atop the food chain, but in all fairness, look at that video: It is really, really fucking funny to watch a monkey feed itself pieces of marshmallow with a crazy robotic claw. Look how casually he's dealing with it! He's all like "Whatevs; so I got a robot arm. Ain't no thing. But dang, have you guys seen these marshmallow bits? This shit be crazy!"

And yeah, maybe we're inadvertently bringing the plot of Rise of the Planet of the Apes to fruition here. And sure, we're almost certainly spelling our own doom, trampled beneath the armies of rage-infected dystopian mice, kung fu rats and super-jumping cyborg apes led by the infallible strategies of the slime overlords, but once again -- look at 'im eat those little marshmallow bits with that robot arm. That's every bit as weird as it is adorable. We'll probably get a pretty bitchin' meme out of this shit.

Youtube.com

Get the first episode of Robert's sci-fi serial novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, right here, or buy Robert's other book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Follow him on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

For more from Brockway, check out The 5 Weirdest Drug Experiments Performed on Animals and 5 Lovable Animals You Didn't Know Are Secretly Terrifying.