“This week, the Ocean Census — a project that has set out to accelerate the discovery of sea life — announced that it has found 1,121 previously unknown ocean species since last April. That marks a massive jump in the number of newly discovered marine species in a single year, according to Oliver Steeds, director of the Ocean Census, a joint mission of the UK-based nonprofit Nekton and Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the Nippon Foundation. Some of the other newly found creatures include fish, rays, sponges, and soft corals (you can see more of them below)…

Those words must be taken with a grain of salt.

Proving that a species is new to science is difficult. It typically requires that taxonomists comb through existing museum collections and academic literature to demonstrate that, based on anatomical, genetic, or other traits, what they have has not been documented before. They can then submit their evidence for peer review and publication — the typical process through which a species is formally described and officially named, thus becoming a new species.

Many of the discoveries announced by the Ocean Census, however, have not yet gone through that level of due diligence and have not been formally described, according to Greg Rouse, a marine taxonomist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That means it’s not clear that all of those species are, in fact, new to science.

As the Ocean Census points out in its announcement, the time between collecting a species and formally describing it as new takes about 13 years on average. That means some animals could go extinct before they’re even described in the scientific literature, the group says.”

From Vox.

“The baby chicks were shifting and starting to pip—or trying to hatch. But not from an egg. 

Instead, these chickens were growing inside transparent 3D-printed plastic cups at the Dallas headquarters of Colossal Biosciences.

The biotech company today claimed it has developed a ‘fully artificial egg’ as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa.

But ‘artificial eggshell’ would probably be a better description for the invention. It’s an oval-shaped printed lattice, coated inside with a special silicone-based membrane that lets in oxygen, just as a real eggshell does.”

From MIT Technology Review.

“China has become the first nation to send ‘human artificial embryos’ to space in a bid to better understand how microgravity and cosmic radiation may affect human reproduction. The results could have big implications for our ability to set up self-sustaining colonies on the moon and Mars…

The artificial embryos are made from collections of stem cells that can divide and multiply like a normal embryo but are unable to properly develop into a fetus or baby, allowing researchers to carry out their work with fewer ethical concerns…

The embryos will be allowed to grow for five days before they are frozen and later returned to Earth for analysis.”

From Live Science.

“The known protein universe just got a lot bigger. A newly released artificial-intelligence tool has generated an atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures and billions more protein sequences.

The database, known as the ESM Atlas, was unveiled today by researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Biohub, a biomedical institute created in San Francisco, California, by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, physician and educator Priscilla Chan.

The atlas eclipses the AlphaFold Database of predicted protein structures by more than 800 million entries, and a previous ESM Atlas by some 300 million.

The predictions were made using ESMFold2, an AI model that Biohub says surpasses the performance of AlphaFold3, the latest version of Google DeepMind’s system and other protein-structure prediction AIs.”

From Nature.