While exploring the root cause of trees' gravity sensing, the Morita lab stumbled upon proteins called ‘LAZY’ and dissected their association with the starch-filled packets in roots to dissolve a long-standing dilemma – is gravity sensed in terms of the force that the heavy starch-filled packets exert on the cell content or is it their position that send signals dictating where the Earth is?

Gas is an essential ingredient of galaxies because it fuels star and planet formation. Studying this gas is important because it tells us how galaxies form, evolve, and interact with their environment. In this work we studied 64 small, distant galaxies and found that the gas is not well-mixed which tells us how it is moving in, out and around the galaxies.

Our cells remember their cell type-specific functions during their lifetime using modifications on histones, the proteins packaging DNA. Such epigenetic memory is challenged during DNA replication when histones are evicted from DNA. We reveal new evidence that cells recycle histones H2A-H2B to replicated DNA with their modifications, hereby providing epigenetic memory across cell division.

Aligning human interests and wildlife protection requires a deep understanding of human-wildlife interactions. Behavioral tracking and demographic surveys show that foraging synchrony is key to generate short- and long-term benefits for human fishers and wild dolphins. We used simulations to describe the conditions under which this cooperation can turn into another human-wildlife conflict.

Even when presented with the same information, liberals and conservatives tend to interpret political information differently. By measuring brain activity while partisans watched political videos or thought about political concepts, we show that individuals that are similar in their political beliefs exhibit similar brain patterns whilst processing political information.

Owl’s nocturnal habits stand out from most birds, and in various cultures they are associated with wisdom or even the magical world of Harry Potter. We describe here a unique fossil of an extinct owl species that was instead active during the day. This species links to some of the few daytime active owls and fills in a six-million-year gap in their evolutionary history.