Virtual reality experiments show that motorists slow down when driving in fog, but they speed up when visibility is reduced equally at all distances.

Following a career in science involves long hours and hard work, but as Eve Marder explains in the first of a series of columns, it can also be extremely rewarding.

A combination of advanced optical imaging and cryogenic electron microscopy has been used to explore membrane fusion in a synthetic system and provide new insights into neurotransmitter release.

Structural and functional studies of a potassium ion channel that is opened and closed by different ligands have revealed a novel gating mechanism.

A combination of molecular dynamics simulations and X-ray diffraction data has been used to construct more realistic models of proteins and to provide new insights into their interactions with other proteins and biomolecules.

Mathematical modeling shows that local populations of the malaria parasite self-organize into a limited number of transient but distinct strains through competition for hosts in immunity space.

Simulations and experiments on systems containing two different populations of microorganisms show that interactions that benefit at least one of the populations can lead to communities with stable compositions, and that strong cooperation between two populations can lead to communities in which both populations are mixed together.

The HITS-CLIP sequencing method is used to demonstrate that cryptic exons can detect messenger RNA that contains nonsense mutations, and then cause this RNA to decay, which shows that these exons are involved in maintaining the electrical balance of neurons and, possibly, preventing epilepsy.

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