So of course I had to try, and here’s the result in < 140 character segments:<\/p>\n
Once upon a time there was a lonely bacteria. He was all alone in the world, no colony-mates or aggregates to spend time with.<\/p>\n
Then one day he met someone new. This new individual was a bigger cell, but that was okay, because he had a thing for that.<\/p>\n
So he begged the cell to take him home that night and devour him, literally. (Hey, you can find all kinds on Craigslist.)<\/p>\n
He laid back to enjoy the consumption and subsequent darkness, but something strange happened.<\/p>\n
In the midst of his rapture (for it was rapture. Again, you can find all kinds on Craigslist), he found that he was still whole.<\/p>\n
More than that, he was whole and no longer lonely! So he decided he would dedicate the rest of his life to the cell.<\/p>\n
If the cell survived, he would survive. He had a unique ability to produce ATP, which the cell loved more than anything.<\/p>\n
So he spent the rest of his life making ATP for the cell, and it worked so well that the rest of the cell got their own bacteria.<\/p>\n
And all of the bacteria and cells lived happily ever after in a codependent, but not parasitic relationship. The End.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So, it didn’t end up involving radioactive pigs, but that will be a Sexy Science Bedtime Story for another day. And possibly a podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My friends have their own version of nerd-baiting. Sometimes they’ll throw out a ridiculous request just to see if someone will do it. Generally someone will take the bait. Chikara67 made just such a request a week or two ago: @seelix * cuddles up to * tell me a story about Horizontal gene transfer and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}