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American Muslims who interpret negative events in life as punishment from God are less likely to believe that donating organs after death is ethical than those with a more positive outlook, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago's Program on Medicine and Religion.

A study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) finds that electromyography (EMG) testing to determine the quality of donor nerves can improve the outcome of nerve transfer surgery to restore function in patients with a brachial plexus injury. EMG is a sophisticated test used to objectively measure muscle and nerve function.

The paper, "Does Pre-operative Donor Nerve Electromyography Predict Nerve Transfer Outcomes?," will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons on March 13 in New Orleans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

(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.

New York, NY, March 13, 2014 – Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Case Medical Center have assessed the impact of the 2012 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations against routine prostate specific antigen (PSA) cancer screenings, which cited evidence that the risks of screening outweigh the benefits. Results of the current study indicate that the USPSTF recommendations have resulted in a decrease in the number of PSA screenings ordered by doctors, with the greatest decline seen among urologists.

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 their expression.