Bazaruto Archipelago, Mozambique: Researchers from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory have documented ancient forests that grew on the Mozambican coast thousands of years ago and have been found beneath the sea, where they now serve as hotspots teeming with marine life similar in biodiversity to coral reefs. The discovery raises the question of how many more of these hidden peat reefs exist around the world’s coastlines and how to evaluate them as a carbon store and develop policies to protect them and their biodiversity.

Mongolian palaeontologist Dr Bolortsetseg Minjin, known for her work to protect and repatriate fossils and expand dinosaur-themed science, received a state honour medal from her country in September.

A new global review of observed climate change impacts on plant communities reveals major gaps in where and how we monitor some of the world's most climate-vulnerable ecosystems.

Mediterranean-type ecosystems occur in just five regions of the world: the Mediterranean Basin, California, central Chile, southwestern Australia and South Africa, and are recognised as among the terrestrial ecosystems particularly vulnerable to climate change. Yet a new systematic review finds that our understanding of how their plant communities are actually responding to ongoing climate change is surprisingly uneven. 

Researchers from the University of Cape Town and the South African Environmental Observation Network reviewed the scientific literature documenting observed climate change impacts on plant communities across all five of the world's Mediterranean-type ecosystems. The study, published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence, was led by Hana Petersen, with Ryan Blanchard and Jasper Slingsby.

The study, published in Science Advances, finds that Australopithecus, the group of hominins that includes Little Foot, combined regular tree-climbing with walking on two legs on the ground. However, by about 1.8 million years ago, early members of the genus Homo appear to have shifted much more strongly towards a life on the ground.

In a world-first experiment conducted across the Wits West Campus in Johannesburg, the researchers showed that information encoded in a special property of light known as topology remains intact even when the laser beam carrying it is strongly distorted by atmospheric turbulence.

Astronomers have uncovered evidence that the fading phase of some radio galaxies may be considerably shorter and more dynamic than previously recognised. Led by researchers at the University of Cape Town and the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), the study examined 14 candidate remnant radio galaxies in the XMM–LSS deep field using sensitive observations spanning 144 MHz to 1.5 GHz.

Detailed spectral modelling confirmed 12 of the 14 sources as genuine remnant radio galaxies and revealed comparatively young spectral ages of approximately 8–42 million years. Many of the sources are faint and lie at relatively high redshifts, representing a population that has been difficult to detect in previous radio surveys. The findings suggest that radio lobes can fade rapidly after the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy stops powering its jets, providing an important preview of the populations that will be discovered by future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) surveys.