The book. Let’s be honest: who among us knew about the blob just six years ago? Not the 1958 American horror movie starring Steve McQueen, but the giant single-celled organism that moves like an animal, produces pigment like a plant, reproduces like a mushroom and is none of the above? Hardly anyone in France, with the exception of the laboratory neighbors of Audrey Dussutour, research director at the CNRS and specialist in ants.
In her spare time, the Toulouse researcher studied these strange creatures with the appearance of omelettes, devoid of neurons but capable of learning, insensitive to cutting, fire or submersion.
The idea takes him to make a book of it. She recounts her discoveries, but also her daily work, with a style as light as precise. And it’s the accident! When most popular science books are limited to a few hundred copies, Everything you always wanted to know about the blob but were afraid to ask (Ed. des Equateurs, 2017) will exceed the 30,000 mark, including pocket format.
But the adventure did not stop there. Over the years, Physarum polycephalum (its scientific name) has become a real phenomenon. More than a hundred conferences across France, articles, TV reports, radio programs or Web formats to no longer know what to do with and even a documentary feature film: the researcher and her giant cell have conquered the country. Invented by Audrey Dussutour, the name blob even pushed the doors of the Larousse and Robert dictionaries. It is the Time.news of this success that the scientist gives us, this time, embellished with comics and drawings by illustrator Simon Bailly.
Six months aboard the ISS
Success obliges, the blob has imposed itself as a narrator. It is therefore he who recounts his journey, from the appearance of his distant cousins, the first slime molds, 750 million years ago, until the apotheosis, his invitation in the luggage of the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet for a six-month stay on the International Space Station, from August 2021 to January 2022. In the meantime, the single-cell with 720 sexual types (for the record, we have two…) and thousands of nuclei has been adopted by some 5,000 French classes.
No wonder, really. Because, with the blob, science becomes child’s play, both literally and figuratively. You cut it in half, you have two blobs, you bring them together, they merge. You can put it to sleep, wake it up, let it age or restore its lost youth. Wonderful creature.
You have 18.93% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.