In January 1919 when the United States was about to introduce Prohibition, the Purity Distilling Company sniffed an opportunity. At their Boston depot, they rushed to fill an 8.7 million litre storage tank with molasses, which would be used to distil alcohol.
In their haste, they filled a shoddily constructed 15-metre-high, 27-metre-diameter tank to capacity.
About midday, the tank burst open, spewing molasses across the compound. Workers found themselves wallowing in sticky, viscous pools. In water they might swim, but in the thick molasses normal swimming motions were of no use and 21 men died.
Even the horses couldn't cope and they too drowned.
It was, literally, a sticky problem. For microscopic life, however, this is normal life because to them, water is molasses.
To get around, evolution has provided a solution.
Cilia are slender, hair-like structures that extend outside the cell.
'Cilia' is Latin for eyelash, which nicely describes their appearance.
A single cilium is only 1-10 micrometres long and 1 micrometres wide.
Their rhythmic waving motion pushes the cell through its environment.
Cilia are also found in your lungs and nose, where their function is to keep airways clean.
You should thank them too, because on that special day, a brave sperm completed a marathon journey to meet that beautiful egg that became you. Doing that required some enthusiastic beating of its cilia.
It's pretty impressive too, when you realise that cells can reach speeds of 1 millimetre per second. That might not sound like much until you look at the size of a cell and realise it's a fair clip.
If we look inside a cochlear (your inner ear), we'll find something similar. It's lined with stereocilia that probably share a common ancestry with cilia.
Instead of being a device for swimming, they detect the pulses of pressure. Their tiny sound-induced movements generate nerve impulses firing into the brain via the auditory nerve.
If that's taking the story of cilia back a long way, we can go even further. Lynn Margulis was a revolutionary - an evolutionary biologist whose work described how life is the result of deeply entwined cooperation between organisms. With Jim Lovelock, she developed the Gaia hypothesis.
Margulis asked a key question: how did those cells acquire their cilia?
Perhaps, she says, they came from a group of spiral-shaped bacteria known as spirochetes.
These corkscrew bugs are accomplished swimmers, happily swivelling their way through fluid.
Margulis' idea is that way back in evolutionary history, spirochetes merged with cells to become cilia.
Now we rely on cilia to hear the sweet refrains of a Beethoven symphony or your favourite pop group.
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