The Latest Breaking News from the Australian Research Council

Some half a billion years ago, life on Earth went through a huge transformation. In what is called the Ediacaran period, after billions of years of single-celled organisms, large multicellular organisms emerged in the fossil record.

If you’ve ever been tricked by a visual illusion, you know the feeling of disconnect between what your eyes perceive and what is actually there. Visual illusions occur due to errors in our perception, causing us to misperceive certain characteristics of objects or scenes.

Giant creatures are usually associated with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths or mystical beasts. But if you go back though the human lineage you’ll find a very distant relative that stood three metres tall and weighed around 250 kilograms. This was Gigantopithecus blacki, the mightiest of all the primates and one of…

The Howard government (1996-2007) shifted migration policy away from family migration and towards skilled migrants. Our recently published research analysed changes in migrant clusters at the level of local neighbourhoods. We also looked at where these clusters are located.

Many Australian parents worry about how much time their children spend watching screens.

Rock art is one of the most intriguing records of the human past – it directly represents how our ancestors viewed their world. This provides a fundamentally different perspective compared to other archaeological items, such as stone artefacts.

When was the last time you saw a frog? Perhaps you came across one in your garden and wondered at its little hands, glossy skin and what looked very much like a contented smile.

Much has been made of the increasing presence of the “bank of mum and dad” in the lives of Australians.

For much of the 65,000 years of Australia’s human history, the now-submerged northwest continental shelf connected the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land. This vast, habitable realm covered nearly 390,000 square kilometres, an area one-and-a-half times larger than New Zealand is today.

Joko Widodo, popularly known as “Jokowi”, has served as Indonesia’s president for almost a decade. He is hugely popular, garnering around 80% in some polls. But the constitution bars him from serving a third term in office.

In 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) truly entered our daily lives. The latest data shows four in five teenagers in the United Kingdom are using generative AI tools. About two-thirds of Australian employees report using generative AI for work.