New paracrinoid echinoderm specimens are described from the Late Ordovician, Neuville Formation of Québec, Canada. These new specimens share key features with the unusually preserved and poorly known Amygdalocystites? gorgo. Based on the new specimens, this taxon is distinctive from Amygdalocystites and requires establishing a new genus. Quebecocystites gorgo new genus new combination, is exceptionally preserved, displaying fine details of the feeding structures, stalk, and holdfast, which are rarely preserved within paracrinoids. This new taxon has a combination of characteristics including an amygdaloidal body with two long ambulacra, a theca composed of numerous, unorganized, and unornamented plates lacking respiratory structures, thin and reduced floor plates, and long thin brachioles. The inclusion of this new taxon into a previously published phylogenetic analysis indicates a close relationship with the Platycystitidae and suggests that respiratory structures evolved independently four times within paracrinoids. Finally, the exceptional preservation of Q. gorgo new combination provides new insights into the paleoecology of paracrinoids including direct comparisons with other suspension-feeding echinoderms allowing for the assessment of potential competition, regeneration of brachioles, and galls and pits suggesting parasitism.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/1da4f244-b5bf-4b57-bfed-e35a08a5194a

Games have the potential to engage a wider public with archaeology, but popular products also continue to perpetuate misconceptions about the past. One potential solution is for archaeologists, heritage professionals, and historians to act as consultants in the process of game design. However, there has been little published about what consultation involves, particularly with the understanding that games with archaeological themes often rely heavily on colonial narratives, as well as stereotypes that affect descendant communities. In this digital review, I draw on my experiences as an archaeologist and cultural consultant within the tabletop games industry to highlight how representation, expertise, and positionality are considerations for any scholar who is solicited for consultation on a commercial product. I also address the unpaid, underpaid, and emotional labor that lurks within an industry reliant on personal passions and work characterized as fun. I conclude with recommendations that focus on reducing harm in the present while playing with the past.

This study investigates how language learners prioritize criteria for evaluating data-driven learning (DDL) tools and how these priorities relate to tool preference. While previous research has proposed multiple criteria for evaluating the perceived effectiveness of DDL tools in capturing the emic dimension of the learner experience, empirical work has scantily examined how learners differentially prioritize these criteria, or how such priority structures can be empirically incorporated into systematic comparisons of tools. Given the recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in language learning, this study examines how GenAI-based tools may contribute to DDL when judged against learner-valued effectiveness criteria. Drawing on a literature review, six criteria were identified: sentence comprehensibility, relevance to semantic learning, relevance to syntactic learning, perceived pedagogical value, accessibility for independent use, and support for autonomous learning. Thirty-five Korean EFL university students completed an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) task. First, they made pairwise comparisons among the six criteria, yielding priority weights that indicated the relative importance learners attach to each aspect of DDL effectiveness. Second, the study compared the perceived effectiveness of a traditional online concordancer that accesses the British National Corpus with that of a custom-developed GenAI-based concordancer, prioritizing these weighted criteria. The results indicate that learners assign differentiated importance to the six criteria and that these priority patterns are associated with the concordance they regard as more effective. This study demonstrates the usefulness of AHP for modelling multi-criteria, perception-based evaluations of DDL tools and incorporating learners’ priority judgements into the comparison of alternative tool designs.

Phonaesthetics examines why some languages are perceived as more aesthetically appealing than others, independent of meaning. Here we test whether phonetic and phonological properties predict listeners’ evaluations of 24 European languages using studio-quality recordings of native speakers reading the same text. 204 participants rated each recording on four dimensions: beauty, eros, status and order on 0–100 scales and indicated whether the language sounded familiar. Because familiarity reliably boosts evaluations, we first quantified its impact and then focused our main analyses on trials where languages were not recognized. We fitted Bayesian multilevel models with random intercepts for listener and language to examine a broad set of predictors: consonant place and manner distributions, vocalic share, voiced consonants, a sonority index, vowel height and backness and suprasegmental typology (speech rate, syllable structure, stress and rhythm type). Across most model families, effects were small and uncertain, with credible intervals (CrIs) overlapping zero, and variance was dominated by between-listener differences. The clearest and most consistent segmental signal was vowel height: a higher proportion of close vowels predicted lower status and order ratings. Overall, the results suggest that while a few fine-grained segmental cues may shape specific evaluative dimensions, phonaesthetic judgments are strongly shaped by listener-level variability, with only a small number of fixed individual-difference and phonetic predictors showing robust associations.

This research was conducted in response to a report by a producer in southwestern Ontario of severe corn injury following an application that included multiple herbicides, an activator adjuvant, and a drift reduction agent. Eight field trials were conducted between 2024 and 2025 near Ridgetown, Ontario, Canada, to evaluate corn tolerance to mixtures of multiple active ingredients, an adjuvant, and drift retardent applied at two early postemergence growth stages (V2 to V3 and V3 to V4). Isoxaflutole applied alone or in combination with atrazine at either growth stage caused minimal visible corn injury at all time points, with ≤1% injury at 1 wk after application (WAA) and no injury at 2, 4, 6, and 8 WAA. Isoxaflutole + atrazine + glyphosate, applied at the V2–V3 or V3–V4 stage, caused 7% and 9% visible corn injury at 1 WAA and 3% and 5% at 2 WAA, respectively; however, visible corn injury was ≤1% at 4, 6, and 8 WAA. Isoxaflutole + atrazine + glyphosate + HiActivate, applied at the V2–V3 and V3–V4 stages, caused greater and more persistent visible corn injury, with 7% and 16% injury at 1 WAA and 5% and 10% injury at 2 WAA, respectively; visible corn injury declined to ≤5% at 4, 6, and 8 WAA. Isoxaflutole + atrazine + glyphosate + HiActivate + InterLock, applied at the V2–V3 and V3–V4 stages, caused 17% and 28% visible corn injury at 1 WAA and 11% and 17% at 2 WAA, respectively. Visible corn injury persisted with up to 8%, 7%, and 4% injury at 4, 6, and 8 WAA, respectively. There was no adverse effect on corn height, biomass, and grain yield with any of the treatments evaluated at either application timing. Results indicate that tank mixtures with multiple active ingredients can increase visible corn injury, but the injury was transient and did not affect yield.