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verb, transitive
slimed, sliming, slimes
1. To smear with slime.
2. To remove slime from (fish to be canned, for example).
[Middle English, from Old English slìm.]

Paris: Squidgy slime mould with just a single cell to its name has the intelligence to find the shortest way around a maze, Japanese researchers say.

Scientists from the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre in Nagoya took a piece of Physarum polycephalum, an amoeba-like organism, and placed it in a 30-square-centimetre maze consisting of a path of smooth gel on which it could travel, and "walls" of dry plastic film which it shunned.

The slime then spread out its network of tube-like legs, called pseudopodia, to fill up all the available space in the maze.

Enticing pieces of food, ground oat flakes, were placed at separate exit points of the maze. There were four possible routes between those two points.

Sensing the food, the slime withdrew from the dead ends of the maze then stretched out its entire body along the shortest possible route between the two piles of nutrients, effectively "solving" the puzzle.

"To maximise its foraging efficiency, and therefore its chances of survival, the [slime] changes its shape in the maze to form one thick tube covering the shortest distance between the food sources," they write.

"This remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence."

The study is published in _Nature_, the British science weekly.

• film _The Blob_ (1958) re: panspermian slime mold from space carried by a meteorite - face: Steve McQueen

Physicist Nick Herbert likes to point out that for life here in the mesosphere (i.e. between stars and quarks), here where we actually live, juice and slime play an indispensable biospheric morphic role. Juice and slime are the ultimate freeform connective and penetrative tissues of living systems. Life clearly has no interest in the antibiotic hermetism implied in such phrases as "boundary violations".

Life uses borders and life violates borders and life constructs media of its own to fill up the extra spaces. The amoeba and the fertilized egg are both sacs of juice and slime -- one grows by splitting itself, the other by being split. Viral-like DNA is "freely exchanged" in gushes of juice and slime -- liquid with paradoxical form -- the very liminality of form itself -- secret secretions -- the viscous slippery in-betweeness of the organic -- the placental wetness of becoming.

[...]

This is the region of boundary violations -- border raids -- penetrations -- some pleasurable, others catastrophic -- of cross-cultural
synergies, ritual brawls, everyday life raised ("sublimed") to a degree of intensity approaching full presence, full embodiment -- and yet still indistinct, romantic as a reverie, an erotic dream of a utopian landscape -- at once a wilderness and a "pleasaunce", a chaosand a ritual space -- the democracy of the mingling of bodily fluids, of divine invasions, of polymorphous sensuality -- sharing the break-down of boundaries -- -- the infinitude of Passion -- the shaping power of desire.
 

- Hakim Bey - _Boundary Violations_

• Palindrome - "Emil saw a slime".
• Blennophobia is the fear of slime.
• Slime Mould has about thirteen sexes
• 604 track _Remember The Slime_ MP3 by Shaolin Wooden Men off of the _Trickster_ 12" on Matsuri Productions
• 604 track _Monkey Slime_ by ECT & Mass
• neo electro track _Slime Slurps City_ MP3 (192k) by Third Electric off of _Urstoff_ 12" on Electrocord (1995)
• prog rock track _I'm The Slime_ MP3 (192k) by Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention off of _Over-Nite Sensation_ on Rykodisc (1973)
• I am gross and perverted

I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little had changed
I am the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help...no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks.. Don't touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livingroom floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go
• German punk band Slime ca. 1978-1983

The earliest forms of life were probably slimes on certain kinds of clays, self-replicating molecular systems and then certain portions of this chemistry became light sensitive and then there was the sense of the division of light and darkness which generated the notion of here and there on some tremendously basic level within these early organisms. Once you have the concept of here and there, motility, the ability to move, the cilia that dot the surface of protozans and stuff like this are elaborated and a new dimension enters the picture, the dimension of time, because notice that a journey from here to there is a journey from now to then. And then, as more refined perceptual apparatus arose, and more refined systems of moving animal bodies arose, a steady conquest of dimensionality occurred. The movement of animals onto the land and so forth.

 - Terence McKenna lecture on Alchemy
 
  

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