In the world of social creatures, from humans to ants, the spread of behaviors through a group—known as social contagion—is a well-documented phenomenon. This process, driven by social imitation and pressure, causes individuals to adopt behaviors observed in their peers, often resulting in synchronized mass actions: Think of stampedes, or standing ovations.

Humans have been an important driver of vegetation change over thousands of years, and, in some places, had positive impacts on biodiversity, according to a new study.

New Monash research has untangled the influence of regional climate drivers, including the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (El Niño), on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Snow accumulation and surface melting are two important processes that are key to predicting how Antarctica will contribute to future sea level rise.

Severe droughts in the Amazon basin over the past two decades have caused low water level periods to last around a month longer than usual, triggering profound impacts on the local population.

Nathaniel Martin, Professor of biological chemistry, wondered what would happen if you took an antibiotic that has been known for 70 years and tried to improve it with the latest tools of modern chemistry. Turns out it can become up to a hundred times more potent and prevent the growth of some drug-resistant bacteria. His team's research is published in PNAS.

Plant cold specialists like the spoonworts have adapted well to the cold climates of the Ice Ages. As cold and warm periods alternated, they developed a number of species that also resulted in a proliferation of the genome.

Although it is surrounded by stressed coral reefs, an island in the Indonesian Spermonde Archipelago has not shrunk but continued to grow. Reef islands hence react dynamically to environmental changes that disturb their reef systems, according to a new study by researchers from the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, Germany.

Archaeologists have uncovered one of the earliest Christian buildings in the Arabian Gulf—the first physical evidence of a long-lost community.

One of the most important controversies about human evolution and expansion is when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from the African continent. Now, geological dating techniques at the Orce sites (Baza basin, Granada) place the human remains found in this area as the oldest in Europe, at approximately 1.3 million years old. These results reinforce the hypothesis that humans arrived in Europe through the south of the Iberian Peninsula, through the Strait of Gibraltar, instead of returning to the Mediterranean via the Asian route.

Domestic cats will do almost anything to avoid contact with water. Not so for their wild cousins, though. Lions, tigers and jaguars have had to adapt to water and sometimes take the plunge for survival.