Background Warming temperatures add to the global health burden, with disproportionate effects on pregnant women and newborns. Low birth weight is a major neonatal health issue in Pakistan, leading to...

Sports teams around the world could help wildlife—if leveraged correctly

Le départ à la retraite d’un paléontologue réputé de Rimouski précipite la fin de la recherche sur le passé de la Terre en français au Québec.

A new fire response vehicle in South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula has been named after a Dreaming story about a powerful whale man that explores the creation of fire, paying homage to tens of thousands of years of local fire management knowledge.

Those of us living with cats share our homes with an ancestral predator, one adapted for hunting and the frequent, exclusive consumption of meat. These instincts become fully activated outside the …

There are so many koalas in some places that food is the issue – while elsewhere populations are threatened by habitat loss. And there are no easy fixes

South Australia's Mount Lofty Ranges is experiencing a koala population boom that would likely lead to starvation and deaths, researchers say.

UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target finds that available new climate pledges under the Paris Agreement have only slightly lowered global temperature rise over the course of this century, leav...

The koala population in South Australia's Mount Lofty Ranges is increasing, raising concerns about overbrowsing and the need for sustainable management. Using combined demographic, point-process, and...

Current understanding of the global mercury (Hg) cycle is heavily skewed toward the Northern Hemisphere. Australia offers a unique context to address this bias with its vast arid and semiarid regions, highly weathered, nutrient-poor soils, fire-adapted ecosystems, ancient stable geology, and distinct biota. We present a continental-scale analysis of environmental predictors of soil Hg concentrations based on 2,396 samples from 1,141 catchments spanning 5.84 million km2 (∼76% of Australia). Using boosted regression trees and random forest models, we identified an index of ferrosols as the strongest predictor of Hg concentrations, particularly in the temperate forests of southeastern Australia. Other positively associated factors included loss on ignition (a proxy for soil organic matter), soil nitrogen, leaf area index, and nickel and lead concentrations, while soil electrical conductivity and water availability were negatively associated. We generated a robust, high-resolution (0.005° × 0.005°) national Hg distribution map using spatially explicit random forest models. Unlike patterns observed elsewhere, Hg concentrations in Australia are higher in ferrosols and relatively nitrogen-rich soils than in podosols and oxisols. Our findings highlight the need to address regional gaps in Hg research and emphasize the limitations of relying on regionally specific data sets that do not characterize global patterns.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Animals feature in sports club logos and become mascots, but their actual populations are declining. What if we turned this sporting attachment into concrete action?

Researchers argue that the emotional pull of teams could become a force in endangered species conservation.

Menée à l'échelle planétaire par un chercheur français, une étude consacrée aux emblèmes animaux du sport montre à quel point ces symboles adorés des supporters correspondent souvent à des espèces men...

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from acute food insecurity. This emergency calls for timely preventive and response actions, which depend on our ability to anticipate food crises. Sinc...

Les animaux peuplent les logos des clubs sportifs et en deviennent les mascottes, mais leurs populations réelles déclinent. Et si on transformait cet attachement sportif en actions concrètes ?