Sticky Novelty Creatures - PACK of 10

Product Information

Dusk hag: This type of hag might share its prophetic visionsfor a price, but such informationwill likely lead to suffering rather than good fortune. Use joints, bones and muscles to build creatures that are only limited by your imagination. Watch how the combination of a neural network and a genetic algorithm can enable your creatures to "learn" and improve at their given tasks all on their own. I n Prakash’s lab, located in the leafy bioengineering quad at Stanford University, he and his graduate students, postdocs, and lab technicians are less concerned with figuring out where Trichoplax fits into the story of animal evolution than how it manages to live such a full life—creeping along the ocean floor, sensing its surroundings, eating algae—with such minimal equipment. “Where does behavior come from in a system that doesn’t have neurons?” he asks. He’s also interested in the shape-shifting animal’s basic physical properties: “Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? Is it something in the middle?”

The test took place in one of Prakash’s recent inventions, a Ferris wheel–inspired contraption he calls the Gravity Machine. Composed of a thin plastic wheel full of water, the Gravity Machine rotates vertically in front of a powerful microscope, acting as an aquatic treadmill for microorganisms. Even in the narrow disk, which is less than half an inch wide, Trichoplax is so small that finding it with the naked eye is like searching for a dust mote in a gymnasium. Please be awarethat this is more of a sandbox simulator demonstrating basic machine learningthan a real game.There are no achievements or player rewards. Even if a creature of yours reaches 100% fitness, you don't win anything except for (hopefully) lots of excitement and joy. There’s much more to learn about Trichoplax’s movements, however, Smith notes. The molecules that cause the animal’s cilia to pause work far too slowly to control Trichoplax’s fastest movements, she says. “If you watch movies of the animal gliding on its cilia, you see that the animal can change directions really rapidly, within seconds or less than seconds.”

Also available on

In my opinion, fey creatures are usually either really, really, REALLY evil or pretty much just temperamental pranksters. They also are often portrayed as very elemental creatures, so pretty much just look at a regular type of Fey you might find in a specific situation and change as much as possible as far as possible and make a story to go along with it. Some scientists believe that Trichoplax, with its stripped-down body plan and easy-to-manipulate genome, could be a useful model organism for medical researchers. It’s especially intriguing because it breaks the rules that most lab animals follow: Unlike mice or fruit flies, Trichoplax has an indefinite life span, rapidly heals, and never—so far as scientists can tell—develops cancer. “We’re always trying to figure out what the rules are,” says Billie Swalla, a biologist at the University of Washington who studies regeneration in weird animals like acorn worms, which can regrow their heads. Studying rule breakers like Trichoplax, which can tear themselves apart and heal in minutes, could yield insights into the treatment of human injuries like damaged spinal cords, she says. Covens can holdsignificant sway over the common people in their domains, whether that is by fear or misplaced trust. A party thatis upfront about their desire to take down a coven could be exiled or find that otherwise friendly non-player characters will come to the coven's defense, such as by acting as a humanoid shield. For this reason, taking down a coven could involve politics and moral quandaries.

One thing Trichoplax cannot do, Prakash recently discovered, is swim. Some scientists say it can swim—including Pearse, who says she’s seen it. Others say it can’t. In a nod to the swimmer-versus-crawler debate of the 19th century, Prakash decided to give Trichoplax a swim test. Like Trichoplax, Prakash and his 15 to 20 graduate students, postdocs, and lab technicians seem to move in a thousand directions at once. One day I watched as Prakash taught a new doctoral student, Hannah Rosen, how to suction Trichoplax out of a petri dish full of seawater and settle them on a slide. Move too slowly, and the animal will attach itself stubbornly to the syringe, Prakash explained, his hand darting toward the slide with the speed and precision of a heron’s beak. To prevent Trichoplax from creeping off the slides, Prakash has built a small well out of double-sided tape, which he calls a jail. “For the first 30 designs we made, it figured out how to break out of the jail,” he said, with obvious fondness. “It can slip under even the tiniest of gaps. It’s quite remarkable.” Night hag: Once creatures of the Feywild, night hags were exiled to Hades. These creatures befoul all good things, turning love into obsession and generosity to selfishness.While the current selection of hags top out at a challenge rating of 7, a coven of three hags vastly increases the difficult of an encounter (see "Hag Covens" below). Hag Covens Dungeon Masterscan use the boggle for either a fun side adventure or as a way to introduce the party to larger plot points. A boggle could steal an object from the party out of a desire to cause mischief and lead them on a slippery chase through a busy city. A group of bogglescould play a hilarious game of keep-away, creating Dimensional Rifts to pass a stolen item amongst themselves and filling tight corridors with slippery oil. Later that morning, I reconvene with the team. Prakash’s cold has gotten worse, and Soto Montoya and Zhong are swaying with exhaustion. Still, they sit down, pull the remaining slides out of the seawater bath, and start looking for more animals.