Extreme melt years are occurring more often than ever for glaciers around the world. We make it possible to measure the impact of climate change on this melt. We show that the extreme melt of New Zealand glaciers in 2018 was at least ten times more likely to have happened as a result of climate change.

The ever-increasing amount of digital data has led scientists to look for new ways of storing information efficiently. In the last years, a new field of research has evolved around storing information in the sequence of DNA molecules. We have shown a new approach, which allows us to encode data in DNA and store it in everyday objects like coffee cups, reading glasses or 3D-printed bunnies.

Plants need gravity as a constant landmark for shoots to grow upward and roots downward. We have identified a novel mechanism allowing plants to partially defy the influence of gravity on the lateral roots allowing them to spread horizontally. In the future this will enable us to engineer the root system for specific needs of breeders and farmers.

It is very difficult to study many factors of global change at the same time. We did this using a trick: we asked what happens if you steadily increase the number of factors that influence a soil, ignoring factor identity. This way we found that just the number of factors can explain general trends in soil properties and biodiversity.

Black holes lie at the center of some of the deepest questions in fundamental physics. Yet, according to Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes should also be remarkably simple. Using gravitational waves to check that this is the case could yield invaluable clues about the true nature of gravity, space, and time.

Collective behavior is common among present-day animals. Exceptional fossils from Morocco - trilobites lined-up in single files and facing the same direction - suggest collective migrations date back to at least 480 million years ago.