Challenge was met with overwhelming success: More than 500 students from France and “blobers”, all over France, made Friday in Chateauroux, France the longest blob in history at 53 meters and 9 cms.
They had traveled from France, Toulouse, Savoie. Nantes, Finistere, and Germany to combine their culture of Physarum Polycephalum, which is an organism made from a single cell.
Under the supervision of Audrey Dussutour (world specialist), students from Blaise-Pascal highschool in Chateauroux cut the approximately 1,000 samples measuring 5 cm by 5cm from France. They then laid them on a concentric pattern on a tarpaulin. After being checked by a bailiff, they broke the world record for the longest cell, previously held by the blue whale’s motor neuron. The participants were placed on a concentric path using tarpaulins.
The record for longest single-celled organism was also broken by the “blobers”, which was held by the caulerpa, an algae measuring about ten metres in length.
“The record has the benefit of shining a light on scientific research. The students are ecstatic about it, says Nicolas Debus, professor at Castelroussin High School of Biotechnology.
The “Eleveton blob” program was followed by almost 5,000 establishments, from CE2 through Terminale, under the direction of the National Center for Space Studies and the CNRS. It consisted of comparing the behavior blobs in Earth with their spatial counterparts. For this unique experience, thousands of French students have been able to slip into the skins of Thomas Pesquet and a researcher to launch.
“I am curious about how the cores in the blob will sync. It should not take more than 40 minutes for the information to cross the blob. Audrey Dussutour added, “We are going to repeat that experiment in the lab.”