You sank my noble gases!
Karyn homeschools 4 children. She's devised a brilliantly creative way to teach chemistry. It's a game modeled on the classic board game Battleship. Her materials are simple: 2 folders, 4 laminated copies of the periodic table of elements, and 2 dry erase markers.
The players first mark where their ships are. Then they call out elements, missing or hitting opposing ships. Karyn explains:
The kids can then mark where they want to place their ships by circling rows of 2, 3, 4, and 5 elements on the lower table.. They play by calling out coordinates. If they miss they put an X on the spot they chose on the upper table. If they get a hit, they circle it. They can continue playing until one person sinks all of another person’s ships.
-via Technabob
Comments (2)
They do bring up the point that people refer to "intelligent materials", but I think the study does more to show the ridiculousness of that label rather than the actual intelligence of the slime mold. "Smart materials" or "responsive materials" would perhaps be better.
If a plant is placed in the same maze, with nutrients at one end, it would be intelligent? Its roots would fill out the same maze, and in the end, the root that finds the nutrients would grow the strongest. Same result.
Am I missing something?
In any case, it's just doing it's thing, growing toward a food source. If you consider that intelligent, then we must consider a whole bunch of things 'intelligent', like DNA and virii, various internal organs, all types of plants and stuff.
Putting something in a maze is a poor test for this kind of thing, i think. Why do so many 'scientists' think maze=smart? bah!
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Scientist