How Slime Mold Is Helping Us Map the Universe’s Dark Matter

How Slime Mold Is Helping Us Map the Universe’s Dark Matter

Scientists are trying to map the shape of the largest thing in the universe, and as you might expect, it’s proved challenging.

The cosmic web is a large, mysterious network of interconnected filaments made up of dark matter and gas—these filaments connect galaxies, operating as the scaffolding of the universe. And as we’ve mentioned, the cosmic web is incredibly hard to map.

So a team at the University of California Santa Cruz sifted through enormous amounts of archived data and then used an algorithm inspired by the slime mold Physarum polycephalum.

Find out more about how these researchers are using slime mold to map dark matter and what this could mean for our future understanding of the cosmic web and the intricacies of the entire universe.