You can learn a lot from a little slime mold. For Nate Cira, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in Cornell Engineering, the tiny eukaryotic organism provided inspiration for modeling “traveling networks”—connected systems that move by rearranging their structure.

Understanding these networks could help explain the structures and movements of certain biological systems and human organizations, from protein units that reassemble themselves to corporations expanding their product lines.

The findings were published Feb. 26 in Nature Communications.