Foolish Design

Navigating a maze, especially when you're trapped inside of it, can be a complicated situation. Scientists researching intelligence have recently found that droplets of oil can mimic the intelligence by successfully traversing a maze. It turns out that the droplet's uncanny ability to navigate the maze arises not out of any internal intelligence, but rather the highly ordered chemical structure of the maze around it. Thus, even though the droplet appears to be highly intelligent, it is really just following a highly ordered pathway.

This brings up the fascinating idea that being smart could merely be a symptom of having a highly ordered brain. How Foolish.

Panic has always been something of a mystery. In an evolutionary sense, it's strange that thrashing your arms and legs around randomly would be a good behavior to learn. Strangely enough, it turns out that such Foolish Behavior could actually be helpful in the real world.

Apparently, scientists training a robot to walk in different ways using a neural network have found that panic can be helpful to get that robot out of sticky situations, particularly when one of its legs gets stuck. Whether panic in humans is some sort of evolutionary hold-over, or the joke of a Foolish Creator, remains to be seen.

The octopus is a particularly Foolish creature, known for a variety of Foolish behaviors including imitating fish, walking creepily on two legs, and generally confusing humanity.

Looks like these creatures just earned another badge for being insanely smart, because someone has finally recorded a video of an octopus using coconut shells to form a makeshift, portable home.

Foolish seaslugs re-mix DNA like DJ's re-mix songs.

In a fascinating discovery, it appears that certain sea slugs can capture genetic material from their environment and use that DNA internally. According to MSNBC, certain sea slugs have acquired the DNA for making cholophyll (plant pigments) that allow them to get energy from the sun. This genetic material is passed on to future generations of sea slugs.