A colony of single-celled organisms can function as a biological computer to crunch a series of historical data points and forecast the future. An experiment that replaced each node in a neural network with a tiny organism showed that the waxing and waning size of the colony could accurately forecast the next step in time series data, such as the size of daily fishing catches of certain species in Japanese waters.

It is one of the most simple organisms on Earth. But the amoeba, a single-celled organism consisting mostly of gelatinous protoplasm, could be far smarter that thought - and change computing forever. Researchers found they have unique computing abilities that could one day rival conventional computers. The researchers adapted the problem so the amoeba, which can deform its body, was able to use a specially designed chip with 64 'legs', pictured Amoeba, are a single-celled organism consisting mostly of gelatinous protoplasm. The particular type of amoeba that the scientists used was a plasmodium or'true slime mold,' which weighs about 12 mg and consumes oat flakes.

Studying micro-organisms usually requires a petri dish, but a group of researchers in Norway decided to make things a little more exciting, in a three dimensional throwback to the 1980s. The team recreated the maze from the Japanese arcade classic Pac-Man, on a tiny scale, and set two kinds of microorganisms loose. They then monitored the creatures' behaviour, to learn more about the dynamics between predator and prey microorganisms. The researchers recreated the legendary labyrinth from the game Pac-Man (shown left) on a tiny scale less than 0.04 inches (one millimetre) in diameter, shown right The three dimensional labyrinth was filled with microscopic prey and predators swimming around in a fluid filled with nutrients. Single celled organisms, the prey, along with multi-cellular'rotifers', the predators, were released into the nutrient-laden fluid maze.