The focus of two recent Nobel prizes, a species of roundworm has made possible another advance in the understanding of how cells talk to one another. A new mechanism through which cells in the worm’s intestine signal for nearby muscle cells to flex by briefly making the area between them more acidic has been discovered. Researchers believe that short-lived changes in acidity may have implications for cell signaling throughout the animal kingdom, from the sending of human nerve messages to worm defecation.