As Africa prepares for the arrival of a powerful El Niño weather event, an international team of researchers has found that access to improved forecasts alone will not protect many of the region’s poorest livestock farmers from the impacts of climate change.

Okayama University of Science has teamed up with the 1,100-year-old Okayama Shrine to create a unique goshuin, a traditional Japanese shrine seal, featuring Tarbosaurus, one of Asia’s largest carnivorous dinosaurs. Scientifically supervised by the university’s Department of Dinosaur Paleontology, the collaboration brings together dinosaur research and Japanese tradition while encouraging visitors to discover Okayama’s growing connection to dinosaurs.

Snails carry weather records on their backs that could be used to map prehistoric cyclones, a University of Queensland study has shown.

The story of Prof Dan Blumstein’s decision to share videos of the marmots in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s field study on an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms has captured the world over the last few weeks. 64 years of research into marmots can provide incredible insights into their evolution and socioecology, but the study is as expensive to run as it is valuable — and funding challenges have forced Blumstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Conservation Science, to innovate in new and surprising ways. In this instalment of Frontier Scientists, Blumstein explains to us why this long-running study of yellow-bellied marmots is so important for science, how funding losses are putting it at risk, and how he’s fighting back. 

Rattlesnake newborns have recently appeared on the Project RattleCam livestream at the camera locations in California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. The babies offer glimpses into the life and behaviors of newborns and their mothers. The Pennsylvania camera, which was launched in May, is showing baby rattlesnakes on its feed for the first time this week. Project RattleCam is a community science collaboration between Cal Poly and Dickinson College.

A first-of-its-kind developmental brain atlas from the Stowers Institute maps both gene activity and the DNA switches controlling it across 232,251 cells, revealing that neuronal identity is rapidly established after birth rather than simply inherited from a parent stem cell.