The Year in Abstracts: Obese Genomes and Banana Galaxies

This year-end roundup of Nature and Cell studies highlights five research results from 2024, chosen for their "general mind bogglery" rather than any formal criteria. Researchers led by Viraj Pandya of Columbia University reported that high-redshift galaxies often appear banana-like, which the study suggests reflects intrinsically elongated 3D shapes. Researchers led by Christian Wolf of Australian National University identified quasar J0529−4351 as the most luminous known, with a black hole accreting about one solar mass per day onto roughly 17 billion solar masses. Researchers led by Pol Fernández of the Institut Botanic de Barcelona reported that the fork fern Tmesipteris oblanceolata has a 160 billion base pair genome, the largest eukaryotic genome reported so far.