This news item from Cornell Research is about: If you think bacteria are unsophisticated, single-celled organisms passively floating around in their environment, you might want to think again. Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered bacteria are not the knuckleheads we once thought they were (at least in comparison to their eukaryotic counterparts). “It turns out they have a pretty complex lifestyle,” says Holger Sondermann, Molecular Medicine. “They can be either free floating, or they can be part of a larger, coordinated community, called a biofilm. They’re able to switch their lifestyle depending on what is happening in their environment.”