Scientists discover new type of lion roar, which could help protect the iconic big cats

A new study has found African lions produce not one, but two distinct types of roars - a discovery set to transform wildlife monitoring and conservation efforts.

University of Exeter

A new study has found African lions produce not one, but two distinct types of roars - a discovery set to transform wildlife monitoring and conservation efforts.

Researchers at the University of Exeter have identified a previously unclassified “intermediary roar” alongside the famous full-throated roar. The study, published in Ecology and Evolution, used artificial intelligence to automatically differentiate between lion roars for the first time. This new approach had a 95.4 per cent accuracy and significantly reduced human bias to improve the identification of individual lions.

Lead author Jonathan Growcott from the University of Exeter said: “Lion roars are not just iconic - they are unique signatures that can be used to estimate population sizes and monitor individual animals. Until now, identifying these roars relied heavily on expert judgment, introducing potential human bias. Our new approach using AI promises more accurate and less subjective monitoring, which is crucial for conservationists working to protect dwindling lion populations.”

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, lions are listed as vulnerable to extinction. The total population of wild lions in Africa is estimated to be between 20,000 and 25,000, but this number has decreased by half in the last 25 years.

The study establishes that a lion’s roaring bout contains both a full-throated roar and a newly named intermediary roar, challenging the long-held belief that only one roar type existed. These findings echo similar advances in the study of other large carnivores, such as spotted hyaenas, and highlight the growing potential of bioacoustics in ecological research.

Researchers used advanced machine learning techniques and by implementing this automated, data-driven approach to classify full-throated roars, the team improved the ability to distinguish individual lions. The new process simplifies passive acoustic monitoring, making it more accessible and reliable compared to traditional methods like camera traps or spoor surveys.

Jonathan Growcott continued: “We believe there needs to be a paradigm shift in wildlife monitoring and a large-scale change to using passive acoustic techniques. As bioacoustics improve, they’ll be vital for the effective conservation of lions and other threatened species.”

The research was a collaborative effort between the University of Exeter, the Wildlife Conservation Unit at the University of Oxford, Lion Landscapes, Frankfurt Zoological Society, TAWIRI (Tanzania Wildlife Institute for Research) and TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks Authority), as well as computer scientists from Exeter and Oxford.

The work was supported by the Lion Recovery Fund, WWF Germany, the Darwin Initiative, and the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence.

The paper titled ‘Roar Data: Redefining a lion’s roar using machine learning’ is published in Ecology and Evolution.

ENDS

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Journal

Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1002/ece3.72474 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Roar Data: Redefining a lion’s roar using machine learning

New carbon materials offer eco-friendly solutions for water pollution, energy storage, and green chemistry

Biochar Editorial Office, Shenyang Agricultural University

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Sustainable carbon materials in environmental and energy applications

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Credit: Zhenli Sun, Yun Liao, Yiyan Zhang, Shurui Sun, Qihui Kan, Zhiyao Wu, Long Yu, Zhimin Dong, Zhe Wang, Rong He, Lu Wang, Qi Meng, Hongqing Wang, Qizhao Wang, Liang Mao, Duoqiang Pan, Suhua Wang, Zhibin Zhang, Wenkun Zhu, Shuang Liu, Muhammad Wakeel, Baowei Hu, Tao Duan, Xishi Tai& Xiangke Wang

Researchers have unveiled a new generation of sustainable carbon materials poised to revolutionize environmental protection and energy technologies. The study highlights advanced forms of carbon, including graphene, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), carbon dots (CDs), biochar, and aerogels, showing that these materials play essential roles in removing harmful pollutants, cleaning water, storing energy, and catalyzing chemical reactions with minimal environmental impact.

Carbon is one of the most versatile elements on Earth, forming the backbone of life and modern technology. Now, scientists are pushing its boundaries even further. Using a combination of innovative synthesis methods and precise tuning of their internal structure, these carbon materials exhibit remarkable flexibility, stability, and efficiency in tackling global challenges such as water contamination and the urgent need for clean energy.

Eco-Friendly Water Purification and Heavy Metal Removal

The research demonstrates how specially engineered carbon materials act as powerful adsorbents, trapping toxic heavy metals including lead, mercury, and arsenic from water sources. Unlike traditional filters, these carbon-based materials can be tailored for high selectivity and reusability, making them well-suited for large-scale water treatment and decentralized purification systems. For example, graphene oxide, activated carbon, and hybrid composites can selectively bind and remove contaminants, often achieving removal rates above 95 percent, while remaining effective for multiple reuse cycles.

Carbon Nanotubes and 2D Graphene: Energy, Sensing, and Catalysis

Beyond water purification, carbon nanotubes and ultra-thin graphene layers show outstanding electrical conductivity and stability, paving the way for high-performance batteries, supercapacitors, sensors, and transparent electronic screens. Their unique structure enables both excellent energy storage and heightened sensitivity for environmental monitoring. Custom modifications, such as doping with nitrogen or sulfur atoms, allow researchers to fine-tune their properties for specialized applications, ranging from rapid pollutant degradation to advanced electrocatalysis.

Fluorescent Carbon Dots and Aerogels: Smart Sensing and Targeted Pollutant Removal

A particular highlight involves carbon dots, nanometer-sized, fluorescent particles, which serve as highly sensitive probes for detecting trace metal ions. When embedded in porous, robust composites such as aerogels, these dots enhance both stability and adsorption capacity, enabling accurate monitoring and cleanup of hazardous substances in water.

Toward Greener Chemistry and Scalable Technologies

The findings advocate for an increased use of renewable carbon sources, such as biomass-derived biochar, which not only offers cost savings but also aligns with global efforts to lower carbon footprints. The ease of functionalizing carbon materials means that their properties can be adjusted for optimal performance in specific environments. Scientific consensus is building that standardizing synthesis and scaling up production will be crucial for their adoption in real-world technologies.

Promising Future for Sustainable Carbon Materials

While challenges remain in fully understanding the mechanisms driving their superior performance, these carbon materials already demonstrate clear advantages over many conventional options. Their adaptability, environmental compatibility, and efficiency place them at the forefront of next-generation solutions for water purification, sustainable energy, and green catalysis.

The study’s authors emphasize that continued research and cross-disciplinary collaboration will unlock further breakthroughs, empowering communities worldwide to address pressing environmental and technological needs with safe, efficient, and scalable carbon-based materials.

 

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Journal reference: Sun Z, Liao Y, Zhang Y, Sun S, Kan Q, et al. 2025. Sustainable carbon materials in environmental and energy applications. Sustainable Carbon Materials 1: e007  

https://www.maxapress.com/article/doi/10.48130/scm-0025-0002  

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About Sustainable Carbon Materials:

Sustainable Carbon Materials is a multidisciplinary platform for communicating advances in fundamental and applied research on carbon-based materials. It is dedicated to serving as an innovative, efficient and professional platform for researchers in the field of carbon materials around the world to deliver findings from this rapidly expanding field of science. It is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes review, original research, invited review, rapid report, perspective, commentary and correspondence papers.

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DOI

10.48130/scm-0025-0002 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Sustainable carbon materials in environmental and energy applications

Article Publication Date

21-Nov-2025

 

Plant breeding discovery could pave way for new crop species

UMass Amherst researcher integral part of international team that identified a specific pollen signal from the cabbage family governing species recognition

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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UMass Amherst Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Alice Cheung

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Credit: UMass Amherst

AMHERST, Mass. — One of the great mysteries in plant biology is how, given the clouds of pollen released by dozens of plants species all at the same time, an individual plant can recognize which particular species’ pollen grains will induce fertility and which to reject. We are now one step closer to solving the mystery thanks to research recently published in Science by an international team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and China’s Shandong Agricultural University.

Many flowering plants have evolved what’s known as “self-incompatibility,” or the inability to mate with itself and close relatives. In this way, a plant can avoid the pitfalls of inbreeding. But what about the pollen from species that are more distantly related, yet within the same family?

UMass Amherst’s Alice Cheung, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UMass Amherst and one of the paper’s senior authors and a key member of the team that used the Brassicaceae family of plants—which includes cabbages, broccoli, kale, turnips, the oil crop canola and other common vegetables—to study the poorly understood mechanism of “interspecific incompatibility,” or ISI, which is what keeps pollen from broccoli from fertilizing kale and producing a hybrid species—kale-occoli. The problem is that breeding between distantly related relatives to generate new species with and improved or a wider range of traits is beneficial to agricultural crops and thus food security.

The molecular workings of ISI unfortunately remain “very much a black box, compared with what we know about self-incompatibility systems and their mechanisms,” says Cheung.

Cheung and her colleagues have made great strides in understanding how ISI works in the current study and even introduced a strategy for crossing distantly related species within Brassicaceae.

The team’s breakthrough involves how plants of different species communicate during the pollination process, either accepting or rejecting pollen grains. A protein called SRK, the key protein known to control self-incompatibility in the Brassica stigma—the tip of the pistil which constitutes the pollen-reception surface of the female reproductive organ—recognizes a specific chemical signal, called SIPS, on pollen from a different Brassica species, such as from the model Brassica Arabidopsis, that it wants to reject. But this is only half the story.

The SIPS-SRK pair then recruits another enzyme, FERONIA, which both Cheung and co-senior author Qiaohong Duan, from Shandong Agricultural University, have a long history in studying. The FERONIA/SIPS-SRK interaction then creates a highly reactive chemical known as ROS, which essentially blocks the pollen from entering the pistil. Furthermore, Cheung and her colleagues’ suggest a breeding strategy to overcome Brassicae pollen’s incompatibility, which could hasten success in crosses between distantly related species in the same family.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ady2347 

Article Title

Pan-family pollen signals control an interspecific stigma barrier across Brassicaceae species

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025

 

Rethinking where language comes from

The interaction of biology and culture

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

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A new Science paper challenges the idea that language stems from a single evolutionary root. Instead, it proposes that our ability to communicate evolved through the interaction of biology and culture, and involves multiple capacities, each with different evolutionary histories. The framework unites discoveries across disciplines to explain how the ability to learn to speak, develop grammar, and share meaning converged to create complex communication.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have wrestled with understanding how human language came about. Language defines us as a species, yet its origins have remained a mystery. In a remarkable international collaboration, ten experts from different disciplines present a unified framework to address this enduring puzzle, harnessing powerful new methods and insights from their respective scientific domains.

“Crucially, our goal was not to come up with our own particular explanation of language evolution,” says first author Inbal Arnon, “Instead, we wanted to show how multifaceted and biocultural perspectives, combined with newly emerging sources of data, can shed new light on old questions.”

 

Expanding horizons

The authors stress that in the search for language origins, no single explanation is enough. Rather, language arose when different biological abilities - like the capacity to reproduce novel sounds, recognize patterns, and cooperate socially - converged with cultural processes of transmitting knowledge between individuals (both within and across generations).

“The multifaceted nature of language can make it difficult to study, but also expands horizons for understanding its evolutionary origins,” says co-author Simon Fisher. “Rather than looking for that one special thing that singles humans out, we can identify different facets involved in language, and productively study them not just in our own species but also in non-human animals from different branches of the evolutionary tree.”

Importantly, the team highlights how progress has stalled when disciplines worked in isolation from one another. To move forward, they advocate an approach that integrates learning, culture, and biology, drawing on fields as diverse as linguistics, psychology, animal communication, neuroscience and genetics. As one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, language remains a story of connection: between biology and culture, between different scientific fields, and between people themselves.

Three case studies in focus

To demonstrate the power of this framework, the researchers look at three facets whose role in language emergence becomes clearer through a biocultural lens:

1. Vocal Learning: Human speech depends on our ability to learn to reproduce the vocalisations of other speakers. This skill appears to be limited in our closest primate relatives, but has independently emerged elsewhere on the tree of life. For example, some birds, bats, and whales are especially adept at vocal learning. Genetic and behavioural findings on this facet from distantly related species help us understand distinct human capacities.
2. Linguistic Structure: Grammar did not simply appear in our ancestors overnight. Findings from real-life cases of sign language emergence, experiments recreating cultural evolution in the lab, and investigations in songbirds and primates highlight the importance of communication and cultural transmission - being repeatedly used and learned by multiple individuals over generations - in shaping the structure of language. This facet shows how the emergence of structure involves a convergence of biological, cognitive and cultural conditions, in a particular combination that may be unique to humans.
3. Social Foundations: Language is used in interaction with other people. Studies have shown the importance of social interaction for learning human language, and also for other learned communication systems, like birdsong. Added to this, humans have an unusually strong drive to socially share information, which is rarely observed in nonhuman animals.

Biocultural perspectives on language evolution illuminate unique and shared features of the emergence of complex communication, and also pave the way for innovative research on language learning, artificial intelligence, and how communication breaks down in disorders.

The research paper titled “What enables human language? A biocultural framework” will be available in Science after the embargo lifts and can then be accessed at http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq8303. More information, including a copy of the paper, can also be found at https://www.eurekalert.org/press/scipak/.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adq8303 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

What enables human language? A biocultural framework

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025