The Latest Breaking News from the Australian Research Council

People have been using fire for millennia. It is a vital part of many ecosystems and cultures. Yet human activities in the current era, sometimes called the “Anthropocene”, are reshaping patterns of fire across the planet.

Frogs are in trouble. While many of the world’s animal species are now at risk from habitat loss, climate change and other human pressures, frogs are particularly at risk.

For most of us, Antarctic sea ice is an abstraction – something far away we may have seen on a documentary. But the radiant white sheets of ice floating on the seas around the snowy continent are a crucial component of Earth’s climate processes.

July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded. And now we know something even more alarming. This week, the European Space Agency announced the July heat pushed the global average temperatures 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial average.

Apple’s iOS 17 operating system is expected to drop any day. The software update comes with several new features, including a tool for daily mood and emotion logging – a technique known to emotion researchers as “experience sampling”.

Until recently, mistletoes were regarded as problematic pests across Australia. They were seen as having been introduced from elsewhere, exploiting helpless trees and driving their premature demise.

Climate change and energy costs mean we need to rethink how we design and build our homes. The updated National Construction Code has lifted the required energy performance of new housing from 6 stars to 7 stars (10 stars being the best). Windows are an obvious focus for improving the…

Most of us know what a heatwave feels like on land – sweltering heat for days. But oceans get heatwaves too. When water temperature goes over a seasonal threshold for five days or more, that’s a marine heatwave. They do their worst damage in summer, when the ocean is already at…

The haze of cannabis is everywhere right now. Germany has recently become the latest country to move towards legalising recreational cannabis, following in the footsteps of Uruguay, Malta, Canada and parts of the United States. Even Thailand has begun distributing one million cannabis plants to households after dropping it from…

Invasive alien species are driving biodiversity loss and extinctions in every country, all over the world.

Today marks an important milestone in the history of the internet: Google’s 25th birthday. With billions of search queries submitted each day, it’s difficult to remember how we ever lived without the search engine.