"So, your plan is for one of us to learn to build nuclear bombs, be cut up and
fed to the rest of us?... Are you NUTS?"
Sometimes a little factoid lodges itself so far into your psyche that-- apocryphal or not, disproved or not-- it bounces around inside your head, sparking ideas and narratives long after other, potentially more worthy ideas have long since slipped away into the darkness.Teach a planarian worm to run a maze, then grind it up and feed it to other planarian worms an they will instantly gain the knowledge of how to run that maze, even if they have never seen the maze before.
I can't remember where I read it, and I don't know whether it's actually true or not. More to the point, I haven't bothered to find out, because I've used that little nugget on at least five occasions, and one of the stories I used it in won a bunch of awards and ushered a few cheques into being along the way so I'm hardly going to quibble now, am I?
It also inspired this thumbnail, which has never been completed, won no awards, and hasn't earned me a single cent. Circle of life, my friends. Circle of life.
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