Per my pedestrian interest in synthetic biology (biohacking), I recently came across the Wikipedia entry for Microbial Intelligence. It looks interesting, and I suspect the whole Reed's Law/Network effects crowd might be interested:
"Microbial Intelligence" or popularly known as Bacterial Intelligence is the intelligence showed by a collection of microbes. A Single microbe does not have any intelligence but a colony of microbes may use various communication systems to take joint decisions which show a crude form of intelligence.
For example, if there is lesser food available to the colony, the bacteria organize themselves in such a way so as to maximize nutrient availability. The bacteria may also share certain genes(such as genes coding Antibiotic Resistance) with the whole colony.
It has also been suggested that a bacterial colony loosely mimics a biological neural networks. The bacteria can take inputs in form of chemical signals, process them and then produce output chemical to signal other bacteria in the colony.
The leading researcher in this field appears to be Eshel Ben-Jacob, an Israeli scientist whose paper's such as "Bacterial Wisdom, Godel's Theorem and Creative Genomic Webs" or "Meaning-Based Natural Intelligence Vs. Information-Based Artificial Intelligence" should really get the blood flowing. Both can be downloaded from his website.
On the subject of biohacking, I recently started reading this blog with the same name as it's subject. It looks promising.
And finally, the picture on the left was developed by scientists at my Alma Mater. From Medgadget: With the help of the emerging science of synthetic biology, students at
UCSF and the University of Texas at Austin have created the first-ever
photographs on agar populated with bacteria, instead of regular photo
paper. The work, published in the journal Nature, was produced for MIT's intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
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