You don't always have to be in the forefront: in wild Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis) simply observing the social interactions of others can provide valuable information about conspecifics. A two-year study by the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and the University of Göttingen now shows that this also pays off in the long term, specifically when it comes to partner choice. At the DPZ’s Phu Khieo field station in Thailand, the team recorded how long male Assamese macaques watched others interact with one another. Males who spent more time observing friendly encounters developed stronger social bonds with certain other males. These friendships, in turn, facilitated their rise in the group hierarchy and thereby increased their chances of mating. The study thus establishes, for the first time, a link between a fundamental social skill – observing and assessing others – and a tangible advantage in the animals’ lives: reproductive success. (Current Biology)

Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Michelle Withers has received a nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to promote the adoption of high-impact educational practices in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) throughout the State University of New York system.

For 70 years, biology has won by taking living things apart — yet it still cannot explain why life works, or why it sometimes breaks. In an Expert Views article in Vita, Chen-Yu Zhang's group at Nanjing University proposes AI Biology (AIBIO), a "Biology 3.0" discipline that aims to turn emergence from a descriptive word into a measurable, falsifiable object — and disease from a broken part into a predictable shift of the whole system.

Family traditions, misconceptions about where it comes from, and a belief that remedies sold in shops are government-approved help explain continued demand for saiga antelope horn in Singapore, according to a University of Oxford-led study published in People and Nature.

A national survey of 1,591 hospitals in China found that only 23.7% had atopic dermatitis (AD) specialty clinics and the overall AD diagnostic rate was 21.3%, with clear gaps across hospital levels and regions.

Colorful stones, fossils, and ancient flint tools discovered at prehistoric sites in Israel are at the heart of a new study. The researchers hypothesize that such objects helped people remember places and events from their lives and may have influenced the evolution of autobiographical memory and our sense of self.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is considered necessary alongside emissions reductions, but proposed removal approaches differ in their storage duration, energy requirements, cost and potential scale. Enhanced weathering applies finely ground silicate rock to soils, increasing the mineral surface available to react with carbon dioxide and form dissolved carbon compounds. The approach could store carbon over long timescales, but its performance depends on rock chemistry, weather, soil conditions and the emissions generated by mining, grinding, transport and spreading. Assessing these factors together is important because a large theoretical capacity does not by itself establish how much carbon a deployment would remove net of its own emissions.

Authors Li Ruan, Jianwu Li, Zhaoliang Song, and colleagues from the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zhejiang A & F University, and Tianjin University assessed enhanced-weathering potential using a global silicate-rock dataset of 9,088 records. The study compared basalt, peridotite and granitoid using theoretical carbon-sequestration potential and weathering indices, then evaluated basalt’s distribution and life-cycle carbon footprint. The authors modeled 50-year outcomes for particles of 10, 37, 100 and 1,000 μm across different pH conditions, incorporating estimates of process energy and emissions. They also assessed cropland suitability globally using temperature, precipitation and soil-pH data.