In my book  Microcosm  (which has just come out in paperback), I took great pleasure in all the things that something as tiny as E. coli can do. It can survive in frozen soils and stomach acid. It can can build intricate tails which it can then spin hundreds of times a second in order to swim. It can navigate away from the bad and towards the good. It can protect itself from overheating by making just enough protective proteins it needs, with thermostat-like precision. It can survive starvation by folding its DNA into a crystalline sandwich and powering down for months, even years in some cases. It can build microbial cities out of goo, and even commit suicide