Deep coral reefs in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) may contain the highest percentage of fish species found nowhere else on Earth, according to a study by NOAA scientists published in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Part of the largest protected area in the United States, the islands, atolls and submerged habitats of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) harbor unprecedented levels of biological diversity, underscoring the value in protecting this area, scientists said. Hawaii is known for its high abundance of endemic species – that is, species ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Auxin, a small molecule, is a plant hormone discovered by Charles Darwin about 100 years ago. Over the years that followed it became understood to be the most important and versatile plant hormone controlling nearly all aspects of plant growth and development, such as bending of shoots toward the source of light (as discovered by Darwin), formation of new leaves, flowers, and roots, growth of roots, and gravity-oriented growth. Just how a small molecule like auxin could play such a pivotal role in plants baffled plant biologists for decades. Then, ...

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 6:34 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, captured an image of it. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's ...

MADISON — A new study in animals shows that using a compound to block the body's immune response greatly reduces disability after a stroke. The study by scientists from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health also showed that particular immune cells – CD4+ T-cells produce a mediator, called interleukin (IL) -21 that can cause further damage in stroke tissue. Moreover, normal mice, ordinarily killed or disabled by an ischemic stroke, were given a shot of a compound that blocks the action of IL-21. Brain scans and brain sections showed that the ...

A wasp's sting might explain it all. Marty Condon, professor of biology at Cornell College, has been studying flies in the tropics for years, and in a paper published in Science this week, she reports evidence that there is more to a fly's ecological niche than where it lives and what it eats—you have to look at what eats the fly, as well. In a previous Science paper, Condon and her co-researchers found that there were far more species of flies feeding on tropical flowers than expected. It was counter-intuitive, Condon said, to see so many species of flies filling what ...

JUPITER, FL – March 13, 2014 – As the United States continues to lead the world in the production of natural gas, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a new and more efficient method with the potential to convert the major components found in natural gas into useable fuels and chemicals—opening the door to cheaper, more abundant energy and materials with much lower emissions. The research, which was led by TSRI Professor Roy Periana, uses clever chemistry and nontraditional materials to turn natural gas into liquid ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a greatly improved technique for making amino acids not found in nature. These "unnatural" amino acids traditionally have been very difficult to synthesize, but are sought after by the pharmaceutical industry for their potential medical uses. "This new technique offers a very quick way to prepare unnatural amino acids, many of which are drug candidates or building blocks for peptide drugs," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry. Yu's team has reported ...

America's current energy boom may take a new direction thanks to the discovery of a new way to turn raw natural gas into upgraded liquid alcohol fuel. In the March 14 issue of Science magazine, chemists from Brigham Young University and The Scripps Research Institute detail a process that could reduce dependence on petroleum. The most unexpected breakthrough in the paper was that ordinary "main group" metals like thallium and lead can trigger the conversion of natural gas to liquid alcohol. The research teams saw in experiments that natural gas to alcohol conversion ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered an important mechanism underlying sensory feedback that guides balance and limb movements. The finding, which the TSRI team uncovered in fruit flies, centers on a gene and a type of nerve cell required for detection of leg-joint angles. "These cells resemble human nerve cells that innervate joints," said team leader Professor Boaz Cook, who is an assistant professor at TSRI, "and they encode joint-angle information in the same way." If the findings can be fully replicated ...

Scientists at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, with collaborators at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois, have unveiled a new way in which plants perceive pathogens to activate immunity. They also show how pathogens inhibit the mechanism to cause disease. It was previously only associated with other processes in mammalian cells. When plants detect microbial molecules, they trigger immune responses to prevent disease. Although several plant immune receptors for these microbial molecules are known, how they are activated once the microbe is recognised ...

Numbers and data can be critical tools in bringing complex issues into crisp focus. The understanding of diseases, for example, benefits from algorithms that help monitor their spread. But without context, a number may just be a number, or worse, misleading. "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis" is published in the journal Science, funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Specifically, the authors examine Google's data-aggregating tool Google Flu Trend (GFT), which was designed to provide real-time monitoring of flu cases around ...

Most of us already imagine the tropics as a place of diversity—a lush region of the globe teeming with a wide variety of exotic plants and animals. But for researchers Andrew Forbes and Marty Condon, there's even more diversity than meets the eye. In a paper published in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, Forbes and Condon report the discovery of extraordinary diversity and specialization in the tropics. The paper builds upon previous research conducted by Condon, who discovered surprising diversity while researching plant species in South America. Later, she, ...

Carnivore management is not just a numbers game, Virginia Tech wildlife scientists assert in response to an article in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Science that urged "minimum population densities be maintained for persistence of large carnivores, biodiversity, and ecosystem structure." "This type of approach may fail in social carnivore species," said Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. "Predator management is incredibly complex and we need to be extremely cautious ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Every cell in our body has exactly the same DNA, yet every cell is different. A cell's identity is determined by the subset of genes that it activates. But how does a cell know which genes to turn off and which to turn on? While the genetic code carried in our DNA provides instructions for cells to manufacture specific proteins, it is a second code that determines which genes are in fact activated in particular cell types. This second code is carried by proteins that attach to DNA. The code-carrying proteins are called histones. Today, researchers ...

Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere to its rocky interior and back again. Now Stanford scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how topography, rock compositions and the movement of water through a landscape affects this vital recycling process. Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth's clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, ...

New York, NY – The protein GM-CSF plays a critical role in maintaining immune tolerance in the gut, with defects in the protein increasing the susceptibility to inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), according to a new mouse study by a team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. IBD is a severe intestinal disease characterized by chronic intestinal inflammation that results from a dysregulated immune response to microbes and food antigens. Writing in the peer reviewed journal Science published online March 13, 2014, the research team writes that this ...

(Garrison, NY) From genetic and genomic testing to new techniques in human assisted reproduction, various technologies are providing parents with more of a say about the children they have and "stirring the pot of 'designer baby' concerns," writes Thomas H. Murray, President Emeritus of The Hastings Center, in a commentary in Science. Murray calls for a national conversation about how much discretion would-be parents should have. "Preventing a lethal disease is one thing; choosing the traits we desire is quite another," he writes. He discusses public hearings two weeks ...

VIDEO: To create supersharp images of their cage-shaped DNA polyhedral, the scientists used DNA-PAINT, a microscopy method that uses short strands of DNA (yellow) labeled with a fluorescent chemical (green) to... Click here for more information. BOSTON, March 13, 2014 – Move over, nanotechnologists, and make room for the biggest of the small. Scientists at the Harvard's Wyss Institute have built a set of self-assembling DNA cages one-tenth as wide as a bacterium. The structures ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – About three out of four older Americans have multiple chronic health conditions, and more than 20 percent of them are being treated with drugs that work at odds with each other – the medication being used for one condition can actually make the other condition worse. This approach of treating conditions "one at a time" even if the treatments might conflict with one another is common in medicine, experts say, in part because little information exists to guide practitioners in how to consider this problem, weigh alternatives and identify different options. One ...

Whether you're a Major League outfielder chasing down a hard-hit ball or a lesser mortal navigating a busy city sidewalk, it pays to keep a close watch on your surroundings when walking or running. Now, new research by UC San Francisco neuroscientists suggests that the body may get help in these fast-changing situations from a specialized brain circuit that causes visual system neurons to fire more strongly during locomotion. There has been a great deal of research on changes among different brain states during sleep, but the new findings, reported in the March 13 issue ...

A new study investigating racial disparities in birth outcomes shows that contrary to some theories Vitamin D is unlikely to play a role in differences in preterm birth and low birth weight between African-Americans and whites. "For years there has been this hypothesis that African-Americans have worse birth outcomes because they have more melanin in their skin which reflects the sun and therefore lowers levels of Vitamin D," said study author Zaneta Thayer, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver . "But in examining the relationship ...

VIDEO: This animation of NOAA's GOES satellite data shows the progression of the major winter storm over the US Mid-Atlantic and northeastern US on March 12 and 13. Click here for more information. Three days of satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite were compiled into an animation that showed the progression of the storm system that drastically changed temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern U.S. from spring-like warmth to the bitter cold of winter. A ...

MADISON — A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher has detected a higher rate of seizures among children with autism who were fed infant formula containing soy protein rather than milk protein. The study found excess seizures among girls and in the total sample of 1,949 children. The soy-seizure link reached borderline significance among boys, who comprised 87 percent of the children described in the database under study. Seizures — caused by uncontrolled electrical currents in the brain — occur in many neurological disorders including epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers report they have discovered direct genetic evidence that a family of genes, called MicroRNA-34 (miR-34), are bona fide tumor suppressors. The study is published in the journal Cell Reports, March 13. Previous research at Cornell and elsewhere has shown that another gene, called p53, acts to positively regulate miR-34. Mutations of p53 have been implicated in half of all cancers. Interestingly, miR-34 is also frequently silenced by mechanisms other than p53 in many cancers, including those with p53 mutations. The researchers ...

In biology, scientists typically conduct experiments first, and then develop mathematical or computer models afterward to show how the collected data fit with theory. In his work, Rob Phillips flips that practice on its head. The Caltech biophysicist tackles questions in cellular biology as a physicist would—by first formulating a model that can make predictions and then testing those predictions. Using this strategy, Phillips and his group have recently developed a mathematical model that accounts for the way genes compete with each other for the proteins that regulate ...