What you can learn from a slime mold

(And it's not something icky and scary like you'd encounter in Dungeons and Dragons. Also, note that they used the word "design." ;^)

clipped from esciencenews.com Slime design mimics Tokyo's rail system Image courtesy of Science/AAAS "Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources," Tero writes in the report. "Physarum is a large, single-celled amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributed food sources... [It] can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection."