We have seen in recent years a massive leap forward in plant genetic engineering which holds great promise for future plant breeding. However, the genes that steer the plant’s powerhouses had resisted our attempts to change them. We tried a technique that had fallen out of favour in the last decade, and we unexpectedly discovered an efficient and valuable tool.

We probably all know about the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, from an asteroid hitting the Yucatán peninsula. The impact caused tsunamis and earthquakes. Pieces of molten Earth rock were ejected into space, and later rained back down. This event caused death for everything exposed.  We describe how fishes from North Dakota help inform us on the season of the extinction.

To persist in the face of climate change and human activities, organisms may need to adapt. We showed that Atlantic salmon from River Teno (between Finland and Norway) evolved over the last 40 years to mature earlier. Our data suggest it was due to indirect and direct effects of fishing: harvesting of capelin (their prey) to feed farmed animals, and size selective net fishing in the river.

We have developed nanoscale guitar strings with extremely low energy dissipation, using silicon under stress. The exceptional lifetime of these mechanical oscillators makes them perfect tools to sense minuscule forces in their environment, and to explore how quantum mechanics can apply to macroscopic objects.