A new report by UNSW Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) and Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) highlights the relationship between caring roles and poverty in Australia. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, households with a female main income earner and children were more than twice as likely to live in poverty as those with a male main income earner.

If the post-pandemic economic return includes minimum-wage increases across a few or many states, research led by Washington University in St. Louis scientists in the Olin Business School suggests that some positive and negative effects for U.S. workers follow in the two years after implementation.

Sheep poo could hold the key to developing the next generatation of antiparasitic treatments that could protect Australian livestock and save the industry millions of dollars a year.

The Atlantic Rainforest has been so savagely clearcut and burned over several centuries that only approximately 12% now remains. Nevertheless, it is still one of the planet's largest repositories of biodiversity, and counter to a process that appeared irreversible, forest cover in the biome has begun to recover in recent decades.

What is the origin of the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, and of their spinning-top shape? An international research team led by Patrick Michel, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Lagrange (CNRS/Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur/Université Côte d'Azur) and Ronald-Louis Ballouz from the University of Arizona, proposes an answer to this question in an article published in Nature Communications on May...

The season of blockbusters is upon us, but theaters have been empty for months—and it's unclear what they'll show, or who will come, when they reopen. Derek Long focuses on the history of the film industry, in particular film distribution, as a professor of media and cinema studies at Illinois. He spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain about the state of movies, current...

A research group led by Professor Patrick Chun Man Wong, Stanley Ho Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, recruited more than 400 native speakers of Cantonese for a study. The results show that participants with a specific genotype of the ASPM gene are better at perceiving lexical tone in Cantonese, and those without it may improve their...

An innovation turning waste material into stretchable devices may soon provide a new option for creating self-powered biomedical inventions.

For decades a war raged within the field of palaeoanthropology. At the center of the battle were some of the most important fossils hominids ever discovered, the fossils from Hadar in Ethiopia, and included the famous Lucy fossil. The question was, did hominids climb, or was their adaptation to bipedalism so complete as to preclude arboreal behaviours?

Back in the 1970s, scientists came up with a revolutionary idea about how Earth's deep interior works. They proposed it is slowly churning like a lava lamp, with buoyant blobs rising as plumes of hot mantle rock from near Earth's core, where rocks are so hot they move like a fluid.

When the coronavirus pandemic really started to take hold in the UK in March, news consumption increased, as in many other countries. But, since then, our research shows that an increasing share of the UK population is switching off from the news.

A University of Otago study of 2,595 New Zealanders working from home during lockdown suggests that most people were equally or more productive (73 per cent), and that many want to continue to work from home at least part of the time post lockdown (89 per cent).

New research may explain why we sometimes overvalue items we've acquired—to an irrational degree—irrespective of their market or sentimental value. This phenomenon is called the endowment effect, and researchers have long puzzled over why it occurs, and why the size of the effect can vary so much across items when it does. It's important to understand, however, because the endowment effect can...

State Department-backed Armenian project to promote democracy instead features false informationCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageThe US government is funding a website in Armenia which is spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, including warnings that Armenians ought to “refuse” future vaccine programmes.The website, Medmedia.am, was launched with...

New Zealand's government has been praised for listening to health experts in its pandemic response, but when it comes to dealing with pollution of the country's waterways, scientific advice seems less important.

We're building a lot of apartments in Australia. High-density precincts are being developed across our major cities. But these buildings and neighbourhoods are often not designed and managed in ways that meet the needs of lower-income residents.

Workers everywhere are feeling the impact of COVID-19 and the restrictions necessitated by COVID-19.

This is the tale of two iguanas. Or five iguanas and counting, if you prefer. Bear with us, because this isn't straightforward.

A 425-million-year-old millipede fossil from the Scottish island of Kerrera is the world's oldest "bug"—older than any known fossil of an insect, arachnid or other related creepy-crawly, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Since last summer's bushfire crisis, there's been a quantum shift in public awareness of Aboriginal fire management. It's now more widely understood that Aboriginal people used landscape burning to sustain biodiversity and suppress large bushfires.

Recent public demonstrations against climate change, human rights violations and industry practices that harm the environment reveal a growing public desire to participate in discussions about sustainability, safety and citizen's rights.

The existence of a planet the size of Earth around the closest star in the solar system, Proxima Centauri, has been confirmed by an international team of scientists including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The results, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveal that the planet in question, Proxima b, has a mass of 1.17 Earth masses and is located in the habitable zone of its...

Around the world, pest insects like mosquitoes often become resistant to the insecticides meant to control them, causing problems for agriculture and public health.

Brian Sinclair wheeled himself into a Winnipeg emergency room in September 2008 seeking assistance with his catheter bag. He had a bladder infection, but instead of receiving treatment, remained in the waiting room for 34 hours until his body—now lifeless—finally received medical attention.

When lockdown measures were announced in France and other countries, secondary-school teachers and university professors had to quickly make the transition from classroom teaching to remote education. As a result, practical work was often abandoned—experiments were no longer possible without a lab, test tubes, oscilloscopes and other equipment.

While the planet has been on lockdown the last two months, a new space telescope called CHEOPS opened its eyes, took its first pictures of the heavens and is now open for business.

Analysis of rate of transmission, NHS 111 calls and Google location data will inform next stepsCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageThe government’s plan to ease the lockdown will be confirmed in an official review that Downing Street expects will give the all clear for schools to begin reopening next week. No 10 said the proposed steps for England should be...

Perhaps the single biggest implication of reopening national economies is that responsibility and thus liability for dealing with the covid-19 pandemic will shift from the public to the private sector. Fortune 500 CEOs right through to small business owners will soon be making decisions that affect not only the health of their business but also their people—employees, contractors, customers,...

World’s largest vaccine maker in talks with governments over manufacturing expansionCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageGlaxoSmithKline plans to produce 1bn doses of vaccine efficacy boosters, or adjuvants, next year for use in Covid-19 treatment.The world’s largest vaccine maker said it was in talks with governments to back a manufacturing expansion that would help...

About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfield—an 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texas—posted a video on Twitter. For over 30 years, DHH people fought for captioning. More people r now relying on technology during coronavirus. Shaylee Mansfield, Deaf girl, had enough! She sends a loud message to @instagram to add #instacaptioning on their platform for...

Nearly two dozen states and several cities on Wednesday filed a legal challenge to the Trump administration's rollback of Obama-era mileage standards, saying science backed up the old regulations developed with the help of the nation's car makers.

Perennial warm-season grasses do not provide high-quality forage during mid to late-summer, which limits yearling stocker cattle from maintaining high rates of growth in the Southern Great Plains. This shortage has resulted in a continual search by researchers for annual legumes that can provide sufficient amounts of nutritious forage during August through September.

Council leaders warn they lack powers to make local lockdowns work, as Tory MPs resist PM’s call to move on from the Dominic Cummings furoreTory anger at Cummings grows as dozens of MPs defy Boris JohnsonHancock: it is public’s ‘civic duty’ to follow test-and-trace instructionsGovernment target of 200,000 Covid-19 tests ‘meaningless’ – expertsGlobal coronavirus updates - liveSee all...

From social media addiction to the discovery of musical genius – is the alleviation of boredom what really drives the world?According to the great proto-existentialist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the life of a human or other beast “swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom”. Indeed, pain (or want) and boredom are the two main constituents of existence, and not...