"As the tour de force of slime mold intelligence, Atsushi Tero at Hokkaido University plopped a slime mold down into a strangely shaped walled-off area with oat flakes at very specific locations. Initially, the mold expanded, forming tubules connecting all the food sources to each other in multiple ways. Eventually, most tubules retracted, leaving something close to the shortest total path length of tubules connecting food sources. The Traveling Slime Mold. Here's the thing that makes the audience shout for more—the wall outlines the coastline around Tokyo; the slime was plopped onto where Tokyo would be, and the oat flakes corresponded to the suburban train stations situated around Tokyo. And out of the slime mold emerged a pattern of tubule linkages that was statistically similar to the actual train lines linking those stations. A slime mold without a neuron to its name, versus teams of urban planners." Robert Sapolsky