People in northern Mozambique use distinct local “dialects” when cooperating with wild honeyguide birds to locate and access wild bees' nests, revealing a striking parallel to the way human languages diversify. Analysing calls from 131 honey-hunters across 13 villages in the Niassa Special Reserve, the study found that calls vary predictably with spatial distance, but not with environmental factors such as habitat acoustics. This suggests that honey-hunter dialects are shaped primarily by cultural processes. Despite these regional differences, human-honeyguide cooperation remains successful and important for human livelihoods across the Niassa Special Reserve.

An international team of scientists from South Africa, Canada, France and the UK has uncovered fossil evidence of a tiny ecosystem that helped kick-start the recovery of Earth’s oceans after a global mass extinction.

Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in collaboration with Huzhou University, discover that the entanglement workhorse of most quantum optics laboratories can have hidden topologies, reporting the highest ever observed in any system: 48 dimensions with over 17 000 topological signatures, an enormous alphabet for encoding robust quantum information.

On approval by IPBES' 152 governments in early February, the Business & Biodiversity Assessment Report will become the accepted state of knowledge on methods and metrics by which companies measure and report their impacts and dependencies on nature.  It will influence future international reporting frameworks, regulatory expectations, and stakeholder pressure. It will equip business leaders and policymakers with clear, practical guidance to meet rising regulatory expectations and make smarter decisions for nature and the economy. Full details and launch plans: https://www.ipbes.net/ipbes-12/primers.  For early access to the report and author interviews: https://www.ipbes.net/bba-accreditation

The study surveys rapid progress in techniques capable of creating, manipulating and detecting quantum structured light. These include on-chip integrated photonics, nonlinear optics, and multiplane light conversion, which now form a modern and increasingly powerful toolkit. 

In one of the largest African ancient-DNA studies to date, geneticists from Uppsala University, Sweden, and an archaeologist from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, analysed the DNA of 28 people who lived in southern Africa between 1200 and just a few hundred years ago. It contributes further evidence that southern African hunter-gatherers were the earliest known human group with a unique Homo sapiens genetic ancestry tracing back to about 300 000 years ago.