The discovery of planets outside the Solar System began thirty years ago and has been on the rise since, but how much do we know about these planets? Can we find out what they are made of and if they are habitable? Can we use our limited knowledge of the Earth’s interiors to predict the habitability of these faraway planets? Some scientists used laser beams on a piece of iron and did just that.

Mars is nowadays a frozen desert devoid of liquid water, but it was not always like this: giant valleys and canyons on its surface show that at some point in the remote past, water existed on the Martian surface. Trying to understand the origin of these valleys, we found answers in an unexpected place: the plumbing system of ice sheets.

If you had to fit two meters of a thread into a ball smaller than the width of a single strand of hair, how would you do it? How would you organize it so that important parts of the thread are close together? This is precisely the way our DNA fits inside our cell nucleus, and the way we do it has direct implications on whether genes are activated at the right time and place.

Confidence and uncertainty in our thoughts are extremely important when making decisions, but how does the brain compute confidence? We found a region in the brain closely associated with confidence. This sheds light on how the brain evaluates our own thoughts and actions.

In type 1 diabetes the immune system attacks cells in the pancreas, causing chronic problems with blood sugar. It has long been a mystery why the immune system does these attacks. We discovered that nerve cells may play an important role, and this could be an important step in finding a treatment.

Eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty and fear under threat are essential behaviors for animal survival produced by the long evolution of life. We found that the brain processes these simple survival behaviors in a surprisingly complex way. The brain encodes different survival behaviors using combinations of brain cell types, like the instruments in an orchestra playing different symphonies.