A 2-year field study has demonstrated that volatile compounds produced by plants when they are attacked by herbivores act as defenses by attracting predators to the herbivores and increasing the reproduction of the plants.

The development of colonies of cells in choanoflagellates, water-dwelling organisms that feed on bacteria, is triggered by the presence of very low concentrations of a lipid molecule produced by certain types of bacteria.

A genome-organizing protein that is present only in the olfactory system of mice has been found to orchestrate changes in the relative numbers of different odor-sensing neurons on the basis of how active these neurons are.

Novel imaging experiments suggest that fruit flies modify their neural circuitry for walking at slow, medium and fast speeds, and that proprioception is not essential for coordinated walking.

Changing the order in which presynaptic and postsynaptic cells are repeatedly activated can change what a mammalian visual cortex neuron communicates to downstream neurons.

The nematode worm C. elegans consumes familiar bacterial species more rapidly than it does novel ones, and this preference for familiarity is mediated by a pair of serotonergic neurons.

Neurons in the hippocampus modulate the rates at which they fire, and the locations in which they fire, so as to encode the information that is central to forming memories about personal experiences.

The Notch signaling pathway has a central role in the formation of the circuit that controls egg-laying in the nematode worm C. elegans.

By using different groups of cells to represent distinct environments and events, the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus helps to keep memories of similar events separate.