All language subtitles for The.Blob.A.Genius.Without.A.Brain.2019.1080p.WEBRip.x264.AAC-[YTS.MX]

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Two teenagers see it first.

Like a falling star
from outer space.

Boy, that was close!

1958. A terrifying extra-terrestrial
jelly threatens to engulf Earth

and all its inhabitants.

In a horror B-movie, the Blob makes
its first ever screen appearance...

Look out! Because soon, very soon,
the most horrifying monster menace

ever conceived will be oozing
into this theatre!

This creature out of science fiction
has given its name

to an actual living organism.

One which has scientists baffled.

The Blob is neither plant, animal
nor mushroom,

yet this single-celled organism
has been around on Earth

for almost a billion years.

It's one of the world's most
primitive, and most simple, beings.

And yet,
behind its apparent simplicity,

it has some truly incredible
capacities.

It has no eyes, no mouth,
no stomach, no legs,

yet it can see, smell, digest,
and move around.

It has neither nervous
system nor brain,

but it's capable of solving complex
problems and even making strategies.

Its scientific name is
Physarum Polycephalum,

and now it's being studied
by researchers all over the world.

Their discoveries are taking us
on a very strange journey indeed.

Leading us
into a whole new field of science -

one in which the word "intelligence"
does not imply the need for a brain.

This is the true story of the Blob.

At the very beginning
of life on Earth,

almost a billion years before
Homo Sapiens,

and 500 million years
before the plants,

were the very first single-celled
organisms...

..and among them was the Blob.

In the great Tree of Life, Physarum
Polycephalum has long been

grouped in with the fungi.

In fact, it is
what's known as a slime mould.

But although the Blob shares a
mushroom's liking

for dark, humid places

and is usually found in shadowy
undergrowth,

it possesses one ability
that's got mycologists

scratching their heads...

..it can move!

With no apparent means
to do so -

no legs, no propulsion system -
the Blob can get around

thanks to its network of veins
at a rate of one centimetre an hour.

Yet when it's hungry, it can hit
as much as four centimetres an hour.

Just like in the movie,
the Blob is a glutton.

It gorges on bacteria,
yeasts and mushrooms.

But the really impressive thing
is that the Blob is just

a single cell - albeit an unusually
large one -

that can double in volume every day

and can reach several metres
in diameter.

It is one of the very rare cells
that are visible to the naked eye.

Audrey Dussutour is
one of the world's leading

specialists on the Blob.

She's a researcher at France's
National Scientific Research Centre

in Toulouse,
and a Doctor of Ethology,

the branch of biology that studies
animal behaviour.

She started out studying ants,
and their nutrition,

until she had an unexpected
encounter.

The Blob had
gone off in search of food.

Such an astonishing cell would be
a fascinating research subject

for a specialist
in animal behaviour.

Her first notable publication
revealed that,

when it comes to nutrition,
the Blob is a genius.

Audrey Dussutour's method enabled
her to determine

what the Blob's ideal diet was, and
create the very best pudding to help

it grow, before setting it a few
nutritional challenges.

To observe the Blob's choices,

Audrey and her team used time-lapse
photography.

Images taken over periods of 24,
48 or even 72 hours,

allowed them to see
just how the Blob evolved

when faced with a particular
turn of events.

The Blob gropes around for a bit,

ignores the less suitable puddings
and goes for the optimal one.

If none of the puddings contain
the perfect ratio,

the Blob combines two
of the imperfect ones -

one of them too sugary, the other
too high in protein.

In humans and animals, nutritional
needs are handled by the brain,

working alongside the stomach.

The Blob doesn't have a brain or
a stomach, yet its can optimise

the intake of those nutrients
essential for its growth.

Another remarkable phenomenon is
that when conditions are very bad

and there's no food left, the Blob
just dries out and becomes dormant.

It can stay like that for up
to two years.

To bring it back to life,
you just sprinkle it with water.

When it wakes up, the Blob's
full of youthful vigour again,

and ready for new adventures.

But Audrey Dussutour's not the first
person to have studied

this extraordinary organism.

In Japan, they have a long tradition
of studying slime moulds.

Professor Toshiyuki Nakagaki
of the University of Hokkaido

is one of the third generation
of Japanese researchers

to be thrilled by Physarum.

In the scientific community,

they think of Professor Nakagaki
as the "Blobmaster".

He was the first to reveal
the Blob's extraordinary ability

to move about.

For him, as a biophysicist,

single-celled organisms
are fundamental to his work.

The Blob is not like any other cell.

Thanks to its sheer size,

unique experiments can be
carried out on it.

That means that Professor Nakagaki
and his assistant Daniel Schenz

can put it through tests usually
reserved for animals,

such as the labyrinth test.

They place the Blob in a maze,
along with a source of nutrition.

Will it find its way?

It deploys its network of veins to
set off on the hunt for food.

It doesn't get lost
in the labyrinth.

It finds what it's looking for.

In a second experiment, a Blob
is meticulously positioned over

the whole surface of the labyrinth.

At the entrance and exit of the maze
are some oat flakes,

there to test the Blob's ability to
connect two different food sources.

The Blob's reaction is amazing.

One by one, it eliminates all
the wrong pathways.

Soon, there's just one vein left,

linking the two food sources
by the shortest route.

The Blob just passed
the labyrinth test.

By choosing the shortest path,

it has optimised the transfer
of nutriments into its organism.

In view of this incredible result,

Professor Nakagaki published
an article in Nature magazine.

It made waves.

In 2008, he received
the IgNobel Prize, an award given to

serious scientific research
into the most unlikely subjects.

Research that makes you
smile - then think.

But the Professor didn't
stop at that.

He wanted to study
the network of veins that Physarum

creates in order to hunt for food.

Now, Physarum is a particularly
interesting organism to study

biological transportation networks,
because it is, basically,

an adaptive transportation network,
that's what it is.

So if you want to study how
network geometries

and network layouts
respond to the circumstances,

then Physarum is an ideal organism
to study these kinds of things.

Professor Nakagaki
and his teams decided to compare

the networks created by the Blob
to an existing system -

the Japanese railway network,

unanimously recognised as one
of the most efficient in the world.

On a map of the Tokyo region, the
principal towns have been replaced

by oat flakes, while the Blob is
placed on the capital itself.

Will Physarum be able
to solve this one?

The Blob explores its environment
and, as it discovers the oat flakes,

permanently reconfigures
its network of veins.

It reinforces the links
between the different food sources,

as the other links disappear.

The network the Blob created
is just as efficient

and streamlined
as the railway network.

When it comes to planning
an optimal network,

the Blob's the equal
of any engineer.

It makes the most efficient choices,

and finds its way around with
astonishing ease.

Audrey Dussutour and her Australian
colleagues have revealed

one of the secrets of the Blob's
displacement mechanisms.

It's a strategy found in ants,
who emit trails of pheromones

to mark where the food is
and remember it.

Then other members of the colony use
that "external memory"

to find the food.

Like the ants, the Blob can develop
a kind of external memory,

thanks to its mucus.

For Audrey Dussutour and her
colleagues, this discovery was

a giant step in their understanding
of how the Blob behaves.

This creature just kept pushing back
the limits of possibility.

For centuries, "intelligence"
was thought of as being exclusive

to Homo Sapiens, the only creatures
capable of reason and thought.

It wasn't until the 20th Century
that researchers started to

discover the cognitive
abilities of animals -

communication, memory,
decision-making.

To this day, the scientific
community tends to view

intelligence as belonging
to "complex" living beings

that have a nervous system
and a brain.

But for some years now, the study
of cognitive processes in simpler

organisms has been
breaking down barriers.

The idea of a form of
"intelligence without a brain"

is being promoted by some
of the true pioneers in the field.

To that end, in Florence,

the International Laboratory
of Plant Neurobiology was created.

Frantisek Baluska and Stefano
Mancuso are two of the world's

foremost specialists
in vegetable intelligence.

Due to the fact that it is so
tightly linked to the human beings,

it is very difficult now to speak
about intelligence

in other organisms,
but in fact it is just very simply

the ability of the organisms
to survive,

and it requires
really high intelligence

to survive outside
in the harsh environment.

The notion of intelligence
in the vegetable world

has always been controversial.

Charles Darwin himself faced
ridicule when in 1870

he raised the possibility
of intelligence in plants.

The father of the Theory
of Evolution was already onto

the importance of roots and dared
to make the analogy with the brain.

In 2005, together with Stefano,
we started to argue that this theory

is really not crazy theory, but it
has some really important message.

And since then, we have published
several papers which are very

strongly supporting this theory.

Following up on Darwin's intuition,
the two researchers have

shown the importance of the root
tips in a plant's growth.

As it grows,
the root advances bit by bit,

all the time making
contact with the soil.

It feels its way,
avoiding any obstacles,

and searching for the best possible
environment in which to develop.

But if you cut off the end
of the root,

it will grow much faster
but totally straight.

It's no longer capable
of analysing its environment.

Once they'd validated Darwin's
beloved root-brain theory,

Frantisek Baluska and Stefano
Mancuso went on to prove

that plants had another vital
capacity - memory.

Plants are made up of millions
of cells that all interact.

A root that processes
information like a brain,

and has the ability to memorise -

these are characteristics that we
thought were exclusive

to the animal world.

Seemingly,
they exist in vegetables too.

Could such capacities be
possible in a living creature

composed of just one cell?

Audrey Dussutour proved that the
Blob is also

capable of retaining information.

The objective was to try
and get the Blob used to a substance

it didn't like - salt.

Between the Blob and its favourite
snack

is a bridge a few centimetres long.

Normally, the Blob would take under
two hours to cross it.

But when, on day one of the test,
the bridge was covered with

salt, it took ten hours to advance
just one centimetre.

The Blob finally learnt
to tolerate salt.

This experiment required enormous
patience and a lot of precision.

Audrey Dussutour was the first
to scientifically prove

habituation in a single-celled
organism.

It was a revolution
in the scientific community.

Audrey Dussutour's discovery pushed
back the limits

of scientific knowledge.

After human beings, animals
and vegetables, she showed that

a single-celled being was also
capable of memory and learning.

But just how far could the Blob
really go?

It's indestructible!

It's indescribable!
Nothing can stop it!

This town is in danger!

How can it be stopped?
Mob hysteria sweeps one city!

Before long the nation,
and then the world,

could fall before the bloodcurdling
threat of the Blob!

To find out, Audrey Dussutour
started with the Blob's

remarkable ability to merge.

A blob cut into two equal blobs.

To find out if the Blob can transmit
what it has learned,

Audrey Dussutour brought together
thousands of blobs

that were accustomed to salt with
other so-called "naive" ones.

The Blob is capable,
not only of learning,

but also of developing
a kind of communication

and sharing what it has learned -
proof of its genius!

She injected salt directly into the
venous system of a "naive" blob.

The blob's memory comes from storing
a substance inside itself.

A memory specific to each blob that
influences its behaviour

when it moves around or feeds.

Audrey Dussutour noticed that,
depending where they came from,

Blobs didn't have quite
the same abilities.

The Japanese Blob is the fastest.

The Australian Blob is slower,
but more careful.

And the American Blob
is the greediest.

Audrey Dussutour's discoveries
were followed by others

from researchers all over the world,
all keen to learn

more about cognition in
so called primary beings.

They get together frequently to
share their progress

on various organisms -

plants, bacteria, sea anemones,
or aquatic worms called planarians.

When it comes to solving
the mysteries of intelligence

without a brain, the Blob is
the most promising of them all.

In the German city of Bremen,
Professor Hans-Gunther Dobereiner

and his team are trying to decode

and simulate the Blob's
guiding mechanisms.

Seen through an electronic
microscope,

the Blob reveals more
of its internal functions.

This network is... There is a stream

of what we call a protoplasm.

This is same as blood

flowing in our body.

You can see here that there is
a flow within these veins.

Within these internal veins,
we can't see it here

but there would be actin filaments,
wrapping up these veins,

which causes contraction
and relaxation,

which gives the force for this
protoplasm to go back and forth,

and this is called
"shuttle streaming".

Three steps forward,
two steps back, like a tide,

the pressure on the membrane
from this current pushes

the whole organism forward.

And the plasticity of its membrane
allows it to take on

ever more diverse forms.

The form the Blob chooses
depends on its environment,

as proven by Professor
Dobereiner's team.

To understand how the
Blob builds its network,

researchers used a centrifuge
to obtain hundreds of "mini-blobs"

just 200 microns in diameter.

At this stage, the mini-blobs
haven't established

any kind of connection.

Observing the creation of a vascular
system allows them to analyse

how the connections that distribute
the Blob's blood are made.

The Bremen teams are trying to
establish a mathematical

model to describe the process.

A model that could help
medicine to understand cancer.

Hans-Gunther Dobereiner observed
that, to feed and develop,

tumours construct a vascular system
similar to that of the Blob.

Computer modelling of the Blob's
system, then,

can give some indication
of how tumours grow.

And our genius without a brain

has plenty of other solutions to
offer science too.

The Blob is an incomparable model
organism in fields as varied

as biophysics, ecology and medicine.

But it hasn't revealed
all its secrets yet.

And now, in Boston, at one of the
epicentres of the study of primitive

intelligence, they're actually
trying to get the Blob to talk.

Michael Levin,
head of the Allen Discovery Center,

has a background in both computer
science and biology.

He is trying to decode
the language of cells.

To help crack the code
of primitive intelligence,

he's drawing on his knowledge of the
planarians, the little aquatic worms

that have been around on Earth for
almost 500 million years.

Unlike the Blob, planarians do
possess a rudimentary brain,

but that's not their most
extraordinary characteristic.

One of the most important
things about planaria is that they

regenerate every part of the body.

So if cut into pieces, every
piece of a planarian knows exactly

what a standard planarian body
should look like,

because it regenerates, it regrows,
everything that's missing

in the correct location and it stops
when it's done.

When a planarian is cut in two,
its cells regenerate to rebuild

a head at one end
and a tail at the other.

The memory of the planarian's
form is therefore

stored in the whole of its body,
at the very heart of its cells.

So we've been studying the question
of how is this information

stored and processed.

And over the years we've discovered
that part of this control is

an electric circuit that allows
these cells to store this

kind of information.

And what we found is that
if we temporarily -

just for 48 hours - disrupt this
electric circuit and, in essence,

"wipe" the finely encoded pattern
memory of these tissues,

when they regenerate they can
regenerate as two-headed animals.

By disturbing the communication
between the cells

and modifying the electrical signals
they exchange,

Michael Levin has coaxed the
planarian into growing

a second head in place of its tail.

It's an incredible result which
opens up infinite possibilities.

What's at stake here are many
applications in regenerative

medicine and basic biology,
because if we understood how cells

specify to each other what is
the structure that they're

working to build or repair,
we could do many things.

We could fix birth defects,
we could grow back limbs or eyes

or other structures that a patient
might have lost,

and turn tumour tissue back towards
the normal cooperative behaviour

that cells have in making
coordinated structures

instead of tumours.

What determines
the function of a cell?

This fundamental question may well
be answered by the Blob.

That's Michael Levin's theory.

When he heard about
Audrey Dussutour's work,

he decided to undertake
new research on Physarum.

For us, the most important
thing in physarum is to really

understand how specific
information is encoded.

In other words, if the Physarum
learns that crossing a salt

bridge is good or that a particular
maze has a particular structure,

how is that represented in whatever
is inside the Physarum.

His objective is to decode
the language of cells to communicate

directly with them and perhaps,
one day, influence their behaviour.

It's a whole new continent
of cellular intelligence

that's opening,
a land of great promise.

In Bristol, behind the doors of his
Unconventional Computing Laboratory,

Andrew Adamatzky sees the Blob
as a great opportunity

to develop new approaches
to computer science.

His research sometimes takes
unexpected turns.

Apart from this Blob Symphony,

Andrew Adamatzky has other
plans as well

for the electrical emissions
of Physarum.

He grafts blobs onto robots

which move to the rhythm
of their electric pulses.

He can even make them
change direction

by zapping the Blob
with a laser beam.

Physarum is strongly
repelled by light.

Inspired by the Blob's many talents,

his objective is to reinvent
the robots of tomorrow,

and make robots as intelligent
as the Blob,

capable of constantly adapting
and reacting to their environment,

just as the Blob has been
doing for millions of years.

Computers and robots,
biophysics, ethology -

these scientists are all working
on basic research.

Unlike applied research,
it's about venturing into unknown

territories with no immediate
application.

However, their discoveries
could change the world.

The Blob has revealed some
of the secrets

of its incredible longevity
here on Earth -

nutrition, mobility, fusion,
mapping, learning, memory...

But science isn't short of big ideas

and space could be the next
field of investigation.

Physarum polycephalum could be
joining the Blob

from that 1958 film, up in its
cradle in the stars.

What new surprises has the Blob
got in store for us?

What else can it teach us
about the origins of "intelligence"?

This story is only just beginning.