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British artist James King imagines what food will look like when we can create it in a laboratory using tissue engineering, rather than on a farm. His work is part of a new exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art about the intersection of art and science ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological. "Design and the Elastic Mind" opened last week and is on exhibit through May 12. Other works celebrate the beauty of beehives and the scientific prowess of researchers who crafted tiny smiley faces out of DNA molecules. (Museum of Modern Art) |
Discoveries
Hormones hurt screen's accuracy
BREAST CANCER
Hormones taken during and after menopause may reduce the reliability of mammograms to detect breast cancer, a new study shows. Researchers, led by Dr. Rowan Chlebowski from the Los Angeles Biomedical Institute at UCLA, looked at data pooled from the large Women's Health Initiative trial, which studied more than 16,000 women receiving either hormone therapy or a placebo pill. It has long been known that taking hormone replacement therapy increases a woman's chances of developing breast cancer, but the researchers found that the women taking hormone therapy were also more likely to have abnormal mammograms - even when they didn't have cancer. These false positives led to anxiety and further testing. "Clinicians should be aware that it's more difficult to make a breast cancer diagnosis in women who are on progesterone and estrogen," Chlebowski said.BOTTOM LINE: Hormone replacement therapy, in addition to raising the risk of breast cancer, compromises the accuracy of mammograms and biopsy techniques.
CAUTIONS: This study only looked at women taking combined hormone therapy - estrogen and progesterone. It may not apply to those taking estrogen only.
WHAT'S NEXT: Researchers plan to look at the effect of sole estrogen therapy on the detection of breast cancer.
WHERE TO FIND IT: The Archives of Internal Medicine, Feb. 25
SUSHRUT JANGI
PSYCHOLOGY
Fear of snakes starts early
Though only a fraction of snakes are poisonous, the fear of snakes is common among people in all areas of the world. A new study conducted by Vanessa LoBue and professor Judy DeLoache at the University of Virginia supports the theory that fear of snakes is inborn or quickly learned - an advantage in a "survival of the fittest" world. To examine this theory, LoBue and DeLoache tested 72 young children, ranging in age from 3 to 5, and their parents. Shown nine photographs, both the adults and the young children were quicker to find a single snake among eight nonthreatening objects, such as flowers and caterpillars, than to identify a nonthreatening object among pictures of snakes. "This provides the strongest evidence so far that humans have a bias for visual detection of snakes," LoBue said.BOTTOM LINE: Young children seem predisposed to fear snakes, supporting theories that certain fears are evolved traits.
CAUTIONS: LoBue said that it is difficult to ensure that young children have never had a previous association with snakes. "You can't really remove experience completely," said LoBue.
WHAT'S NEXT: LoBue and her colleagues are conducting similar studies on infants as young as nine months to see if they also show the same predisposition toward snakes.
WHERE TO FIND IT: Psychological Science, March
KATHY DOBSON
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