Asian women tend to have much lower breast-cancer rates than their Western counterparts--unless they move to Europe or North America. Then the cancer’s incidence in these women begins to match local norms.This observation has suggested that something about the Western way of life, probably diet, promotes cancer--or that something about Eastern diets inhibits the development of breast malignancies. Strong support for the latter comes from a recent study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.The study showed tha...

Twelve years ago, scientists uncovered a mechanism to explain why the folk remedy of eating cranberries fights urinary tract infections. It now appears that the medicinal powers of the pucker-inducing berries might extend to breast cancer as well.For years, Najla Guthrie and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London have been exploring anticancer prospects of flavonoids, natural antioxidants, isolated from citrus juices (SN: 5/4/96, p. 287). Because deeply pigmented berries also contain dozens of such compounds--several with suspected anticancer activity--Guthrie recently t...

Magnetic resonance imaging can help determine the health of a wheel of cheese. (p. 139)

Citrus fruits may deserve a more prominent role in the diet. A research team in Canada has just shown that drinking several glasses of orange juice daily can pump up blood concentrations of the so-called good cholesterol.Boosting this high-density-lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol can slow the buildup of artery-clogging plaque (SN: 9/9/89, p. 171).In their study, Elzbieta M. Kurowska and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, monitored changes in cholesterol concentration and related blood chemicals in 16 men and 9 women for 23 weeks. The middle-age volunteers were...

"Need a zero-volume bottle? Searching for a one-sided surface? Want the ultimate in nonorientability?"The intriguing subject of these cryptic entreaties is a bizarre mathematical object known as a Klein bottle, discovered in 1882 by German mathematician Felix Klein (1849-1925).An ordinary bottle has an inside and an outside. To walk from the inside to the outside, a fly would have to cross the lip that forms the bottle's mouth. A Klein bottle has no such edge. What appears to be its inside is continuous with its outside.One way to describe a Klein bottle is in terms of instructions for making ...

The elegant, swooping forms carved out of wood by sculptor Robert Longhurst often resemble gracefully curved soap films that span twisted loops of wire dipped into soapy water. Alhough these abstract sculptures bear an uncanny resemblance to mathematical forms known as minimal surfaces, they emerge from Longhurst's imagination rather than from mathematics."Curvilinear works, whether they fall into the categories of art, architecture, or design, have always held a fascination for me beyond that of straight lines," Longhurst says.Trained as an architect, Longhurst has been carving wood and stone...