Back in April 2016, French scientists rocked the neuroscience world when they found evidence that a brainless slime called Physarum polycephalum was learning to avoid unpleasant stimuli during repeated trials.

Now, a few months later, the team has shown that the 'informed' slime might actually be able to transfer this knowledge to a patch of naive slime by fusing with it. And that's pretty impressive, but it's just one of the weirdly incredible things about P. polycephalum.

While the slime looks like nothing more than an oozy patch of yellow, it's actually a colony of single-celled organisms more closely related to amoeba than actual fungal moulds. And these microscopic protozoan cells come together to form a much larger entity.

For this reason, the organism is commonly called the many-headed slime.