Slime moulds exhibit the kind of "contemplative behaviour" that Hamlet is famous for, muses Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University in Japan. "Hamlet couldn't decide what to do so he did nothing. Then he chose a strong course of action." Similarly, slime moulds stop moving when they encounter a toxic substance. "But once action occurs, it too is strong," Nakagaki says. The slime mould's puzzle-solving ability - Shakespearean or otherwise - is a discovery that is unlikely to change the world, but it won Nakagaki and his colleagues an Ig Nobel Prize for cognitive science last week at the annual event held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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