I found a very interesting experiment that places a slime mold specimen in a situation that encouraged it to grow in a way that lent insight into Tokyo's rail system efficiency.
Some organisms have the ability to create efficient networks that allow them to access resources with minimum energy output. A team led by Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan set up an environment that mimicked the Tokyo metropolitan area with food crumbs representing destinations. Researchers placed the slime mold Physarum polycephalum into the environment and allowed it grow and establish its own feeding network. The final result was a remarkably efficient network eerily similar to Tokyo's existing rail network.
Researches critically compared the organism's design with Tokyo's design and used what they learned to create biologically inspired algorithms for more efficient transportation network design. Innovation is definitely interdisciplinary.
Here are links to the published research in Science Magazine, a good supporting article by Wolfgang Marwan of Otto van Guericke University (Germany), and a concise overview from MSNBC.
If the links don't work, try searching "Network Design" on sciencemag.org. USF's online database subscriptions include this journal, so you should be able to access it through the USF library.
