Exposing male mice to nicotine or cocaine enables their male offspring to cope with high doses of either, which suggests that such paternal effects are generic, rather than being a response to a specific type of stress.
Publication bias, in which positive results are preferentially reported by authors and published by journals, can restrict the visibility of evidence against false claims and allow such claims to be canonized inappropriately as facts.
Comparing maize to its wild ancestor teosinte advances our understanding of how it and other cereal crops evolved, and also identifies the genetic variation that can contribute to important agricultural traits.
A better understanding of the natural history of model organisms will increase their value as model systems and also keep them at the forefront of research.
The circadian clock in the model plant organism Arabidopsis thaliana is best described as a highly connected network made up of clock-regulated activators and repressors of transcription, rather than two coupled, repressor-based feedback loops.
Dubbed the 'green yeast', the model alga C. reinhardtii has profoundly advanced many areas of biology, but much remains to be learnt about its life in the wild.
