Ocean species discovered! Researchers team up to describe 14 new marine animals

Pensoft Publishers

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Spinther bohnorum.

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Credit: Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance

Earth's vast oceanic biodiversity remains largely unexplored, with only a fraction of an estimated two million total living marine species formally named and described. A significant challenge is the protracted delay, often spanning decades, between the initial discovery of a new species and its official publication.

Ocean Species Discoveries was established to address this critical gap, offering a high-quality, data-rich publication platform specifically tailored for concise marine invertebrate species descriptions. This revolutionary approach can significantly accelerate the timeline for new species descriptions, a vital advantage given the escalating threat of human-driven biodiversity loss, which risks species becoming extinct before scientists even know they exist.

The initiative is coordinated by the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), a project of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt aimed at facilitating global collaboration, offering technical support for species documentation, and promoting efficient taxonomic publishing.

The second major collection in the Ocean Species Discoveries had over 20 researchers working together to describe 14 new marine invertebrate species and two new genera from all over the world, including worms, mollusks, and crustaceans. They published their research in a scientific paper in Biodiversity Data Journal, a year after the project’s pilot publication.

“Our shared vision is making taxonomy faster, more efficient, more accessible and more visible,” the team said in their paper.

The newly established Discovery Laboratory at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt proved critical help in describing most of the new species. The Laboratory offers access to integrative research methods such as light and electron microscopy, confocal imaging, molecular barcoding, and micro-CT scanning, making it easy for researchers to produce the high-quality data necessary for robust species descriptions.

The animals studied in this project come from ocean depths ranging from 1 to over 6,000 meters. The deepest-living animal the researchers explored is Veleropilina gretchenae, a new species of mollusk that was recovered from the Aleutian Trench at a depth of 6,465 meters. It is one of the first species in the class Monoplacophora to have a high-quality genome published directly from the holotype specimen.

A landmark achievement in this collection is the anatomical description of the carnivorous bivalve Myonera aleutiana, which represents only the second bivalve species documented in detail using solely non-invasive micro-CT scanning. The process generated over 2,000 tomographic images, providing unprecedented clarity on the bivalve's internal tissues and soft-body parts. This is the first study to offer detailed anatomy information on any Myonera species.

Its description also marks a new depth record: it was found at depths of 5,170–5,280 meters, about 800 meters deeper than any other documented Myonera individual.

One of the newly described species honours Johanna Rebecca Senckenberg (1716–1743), a naturalist and benefactor who supported science and medicine, which contributed to the forming of the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research. The amphipod Apotectonia senckenbergae was discovered in a mussel bed at the Galápagos Rift hydrothermal vent fields at a depth of 2,602 meters.

Some of the deep-sea inhabitants have curious appearances: the parasitic isopod Zeaione everta exhibits distinctive protuberances on the female’s back that resemble popped kernels of popcorn. The genus name, which derives from the corn genus Zea, reflects this resemblance. Found in the Australian intertidal zone, this species also represents a new genus.

The paper also sheds more light on known deep-sea species such as the tusk shell Laevidentalium wiesei, found at depths of more than 5,000 meters. The researchers found out it was carrying its own secret hitchhiker, a sea anemone attached to the shell's anterior (concave) side. This is the first time an interaction of this kind is reported in the genus Laevidentalium.

 

Research article:

 

(SOSA) SOSA, Andrade LF, Boyko CB, Brandt A, Buge B, Dávila Jiménez Y, Henseler M, Hernández Alcántara P, Jóźwiak P, Knauber H, Marcondes Machado F, Martínez-Muñoz CA, Momtazi F, Nakadera Y, Qiu J-W, Riehl T, Rouse GW, Sigwart JD, Sirenko B, Souza-Filho JF, Steger J, Stępień A, Tilic E, Trautwein B, Vončina K, Williams JD, Zhang J (2025) Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27 — Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea. Biodiversity Data Journal 13: e160349. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.13.e160349

 

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Journal

Biodiversity Data Journal

DOI

10.3897/BDJ.13.e160349 

Article Title

Ocean Species Discoveries 13–27 — Taxonomic contributions to the diversity of Polychaeta, Mollusca and Crustacea

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2025

Ferreiraella charazata.

Myonera aleutiana.





Apotectonia senckenbergae.

Metharpinia hirsuta.

Veleropilina gretchenae.



Laevidentalium wiesei.


Credit
Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance

 

Arcadia grant improves open access to conservation knowledge by strengthening the IUCN Library

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International Union for Conservation of Nature

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Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 15 October 2025 (IUCN) – Over 1,500 historical IUCN publications are now available online, following a three-year grant from Arcadia. The project has enabled the creation of IUCN’s Open Access Policy and upgrades to the IUCN Library, cementing the Union’s commitment to open access conservation knowledge. The project has enabled the creation of IUCN’s Open Access Policy and upgrades to the IUCN Library, cementing the Union’s commitment to open access conservation knowledge.

“The digitisation of thousands of pages of historical documents has transformed our access to knowledge about our past, ensuring that decades of learning, growth and transformation are perpetually stored in the IUCN Library and made easily available to the Union and beyond,” said Dr Jon Paul Rodriguez, Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC).

In 2021, IUCN was the recipient of a 3-year grant from Arcadia—a family philanthropy—enabling IUCN to promote and improve researchers’ open access to high-quality conservation knowledge. Specifically, the grant aimed to support IUCN in advancing and promoting principles of open access through scholarly communications amongst IUCN’s membership and expert network. Since the grant was awarded, it has allowed IUCN to digitise its back catalogue of publications and to develop an open access policy. 

In total, the grant has allowed more than 115,000 pages across 1,540 unique titles of historical IUCN publications, including all previous issues of Species and of IUCN’s Members’ magazine going back to 1948. Beyond this, an additional 167 publications were made available to the public through the IUCN Library System.  

In addition to the works uploaded, IUCN has upgraded the user experience and functionality of the publications search of the IUCN Library System, allowing users to locate publications by filtering by online and physical availability, by IUCN subcollection, and the publishing entity.  

Furthermore, the grant enabled development and approval of the IUCN Open Access Policy for Publications, approved by the IUCN Executive Board in October 2024, leading to the adoption of CC-BY-NC licenses for all publications published under IUCN copyright since then, such as Enhancing climate change mitigation in protected areas. Building on this success, IUCN worked with its journal editors to improve the quality of journal articles to a level where they can be accepted into the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), specifically PARKS, Gajah, and Edentata (now Xenarthra). 

In total, IUCN reached hundreds of conservation professionals on open access and other scholarly communication topics through 20 dedicated information sessions and panels, with 832 total attendees present across all sessions. These events included: a hybrid panel event at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in September 2021; organising programming for IUCN’s first-ever participation in International Open Access Weeks in 2022, 2023, and 2024; and organising six other information sessions for IUCN constituencies. Recordings can be accessed through Vimeo. 

All of these efforts have contributed towards IUCN’s goal to improve the availability of, quality of, and access to conservation literature online, as well as to ultimately secure the scientific integrity and impact of nature conservation efforts. 

Arcadia helps people to record cultural heritage, to conserve and restore nature, and to promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1.3 billion* to organisations around the world.

 

Expert commentary reviews AlphaEarth foundations and its promise for remote sensing

New article in Journal of Geo-information Science analyzes the potential and challenges of Google DeepMind’s large-scale Earth observation model

Beijing Zhongke Journal Publising Co. Ltd.

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A new scholarly commentary published in the Journal of Geo-information Science offers an independent review of AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) — a large-scale remote sensing foundation model developed by Google DeepMind. Authored by Professor Qiming Qin from the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University, the article examines how AEF could transform Earth observation and geospatial artificial intelligence, while also spotlighting key technical and practical challenges.

As the number of Earth observation satellites continues to rise, remote sensing data is expanding at an unprecedented pace. While this surge of information opens new opportunities for global environmental monitoring, it also poses significant obstacles: fragmented data sources, limited labeled samples, task-specific models with poor generalization, and high preprocessing costs.

The commentary explains how AEF addresses these issues by integrating multimodal data — including optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), LiDAR, climate simulations, and text — into a unified 64-dimensional embedding field. This approach fosters cross-modal and spatiotemporal semantic consistency, improves large-scale data fusion, and makes downstream applications more “analysis-ready.”

Professor Qin highlights three core contributions of AEF:

• Breaking data silos: Creating globally consistent embedding layers to unify heterogeneous remote sensing datasets.
• Enhancing semantic similarity: Applying a von Mises-Fisher spherical embedding mechanism for robust retrieval and change detection.
• Reducing application costs: Shifting complex preprocessing and feature engineering into the pre-training stage to lower technical and financial barriers for researchers and industry.

The commentary also outlines AEF’s potential evolution in three stages:

• Stage 1: Enabling large-scale land cover classification and change detection.
• Stage 2: Coupling with physical and ecological models to support scientific discovery, such as carbon cycle analysis and landscape prediction.
• Stage 3: Developing into a spatial intelligence infrastructure that offers standardized APIs, allowing global users and intelligent agents to access advanced geospatial representations without processing raw satellite data.

At the same time, the author underscores critical limitations: AEF’s 64-dimensional embeddings remain difficult to interpret; its robustness in extreme or data-sparse conditions (e.g., polar regions) is uncertain; and its reported performance gains require broader independent validation across diverse, real-world applications.

Overall, the commentary concludes that AlphaEarth Foundations represents an important shift in geospatial AI. By enhancing data efficiency and cross-task generalization, it creates new opportunities for Earth system science and environmental monitoring, while emphasizing the need for improved interpretability, adaptability, and empirical validation.

See the article:

 

AlphaEarth Foundations: The Potential and Challenges of Remote Sensing Foundation

Models

 

https://doi.org/10.12082/dqxxkx.2025.250426

 

https://www.sciengine.com/JGIS/doi/10.12082/dqxxkx.2025.250426（If you want to see the English version of the full text, please click on the (iFLYTEK Translation) in the article page.）

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DOI

10.12082/dqxxkx.2025.250426 

Article Title

AlphaEarth Foundations: The Potential and Challenges of Remote Sensing Foundation Models

Article Publication Date

25-Oct-2025

 

Reichman University researchers show that experiencing music through both hearing and touch enhances emotional response

Reichman University

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Professor Amir Amedi, Reichman University

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Credit: Oz Schechter

Study published on 01 October 2025  in Frontiers in Virtual Reality demonstrates how multisensory music experiences can boost enjoyment, reduce anxiety, and open new therapeutic possibilities

A research team at the Reichman University Dina Recanati School of Medicine and the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology has discovered that experiencing music in a multisensory way, combining both hearing and touch , significantly enhances people’s emotional responses to it. The study, conducted at the Institute for Brain, Cognition and Technology, introduces a unique device that converts sound into tactile vibrations on the hands and body, offering listeners a new dimension of musical experience.

“What we see is that people respond differently to music that is also felt through the body,” says Naama Schwartz, PhD candidate and co-first author of the work. “Imagine you’re at a concert of a band you love—your experience is inherently multisensory: you hear, you see, and you feel the vibrations. Our device captures part of that unified experience in a controlled way.”

Dr. Adi Snir, co-first author and senior researcher, explains: “The human tactile system is quite interesting in how it relates to sound. As humans we are capable of detecting vibration through the body though in a much more reduced frequency range than the auditory system. We had to develop an algorithm to convert streamed music to the correct frequency range in order to allow the experience of music through the hands and body to contain as much musical information as possible.” 

The results were striking. Participants reported greater enjoyment and more positive emotions when music was both heard and felt. The effects were even stronger when listeners could select music they personally liked. Importantly, the study also found a reduction in anxiety, pointing to therapeutic potential.

The researchers see broad applications: from enhancing virtual reality and entertainment technologies to supporting mental health and emotional regulation through multisensory therapies. As Dr. Snir explains: “With VR and haptic devices becoming more accessible, this opens up new avenues for creating enriched experiences, and for harnessing music’s therapeutic benefits.”

Professor Amir Amedi, head of the lab, notes: “When our brain receives matching signals across different senses, our attention is drawn more strongly to the experience. The auditory and tactile systems are particularly interconnected, which helps explain why the effect is immediate and powerful. This work is an important step into understanding not only the mechanisms enabling sensory integration, but how such integration can impact emotional states, and it’s broad therapeutic potential”. 

 

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Journal

Frontiers in Virtual Reality

DOI

10.1038/nrn2152 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Feeling the music: exploring emotional effects of auditory-tactile musical experiences

Article Publication Date

1-Oct-2025