This Month in 2014

An illustrator drops the barriers between work and play with software to model and explore cells.

When multiple factors can affect a system, allowing for interaction can increase sensitivity.

Measuring neurotransmitter concentration, letting lab meetings run free, and why biology does not own neuroscience.

An avian backpack for discerning individual zebra finches' songs and studying cognition comes to Switzerland via Novosibirsk, Russia.

For studies with hierarchical noise sources, use a nested analysis of variance approach.

Cells brim with activity that a special set of protein assays can help track.

Quality is often more important than quantity.

Proteins 'breathe' in an ultrafast way that can be captured with XFELs.

From the netherworld between biology and chemistry comes a new method that leverages both fields and delivers acceleration to chromatin biochemistry.

Complex relationships demand trade-offs.

It's a long-term commitment to find genetic ways to both trigger and track fly behavior.

Good experimental designs mitigate experimental error and the impact of factors not under study.

He switched from designing fluorescent proteins to investigating immunology.

Good experimental designs limit the impact of variability and reduce sample-size requirements.

Lessons from the volleyball court help to compare ways to measure how much flies eat.

Nonparametric tests robustly compare skewed or ranked data.

When a large number of tests are performed, P values must be interpreted differently.

Traversing biology at multiple scales, a system automates flow cytometry. And a constitution changes lab culture.

Robustly comparing pairs of independent or related samples requires different approaches to the t-test.