Biomimetic studies inspire japanese urbanists.
Atsushi Tero and his colleagues from Hokkaido University analysed the way the mould Physarum polycephalum invades a culture plate and compared it with the communication network of Tokyo and its suburbs.
Then they created a mimick of the Tokyo region on a growth plate and left the mould invade it,
monitoring the way the mould organises its food and reserve supplies.The picture was remarkably similar to that of Tokyo's commmunication network. The scientists then constructed an algorithm meant to represent the way the network is constructed, and they propose it as an optimised solution to urban growth, arguing that the enormous time course of evolution has probably endowed living cells with a particularly efficient communication algorithm. 
(Read More)
