Where is the line between advocating science and protecting corporate profits? It's usually only clear to people trying to show the other side is involved in wrongdoing. A paper in PLOS Medicine uses sugar industry documents to note how they influenced research priorities for the 1971 US National Caries Program (NCP).

When it comes to buying things, our brains can't see the big, black-and-white forest for all the tiny, colorful trees, according to marketing scholars at The Ohio State University, who say that people who were shown product images in color were more likely to focus on small product details--even superfluous ones--instead of practical concerns such as cost and functionality.

The findings in the Journal of Consumer Research mesh well with science, they believe, namely in how vision evolved in the brain, and suggest that viewing objects in black and white helps our brains focus on what's most important. The researchers recruited people through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service that provides online study participants for fee, so caveat emptor on the results.

Studying the intricate fractal patterns on the surface of cells could give researchers a new insight into the physical nature of cancer, and provide new ways of preventing the disease from developing.

This is according to scientists in the US who have, for the first time, shown how physical fractal patterns emerge on the surface of human cancer cells at a specific point of progression towards cancer.

Publishing their results today, 11 March, in the Institute of Physics and Germany Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, they found that the distinctive repeating fractal patterns develop at the precise point in which precancerous cells transform into cancer cells, and that fractal patterns are not present either before or after this point.

New research has shown that patients having heart surgery do not benefit if doctors wait until a patient has become substantially anaemic before giving a transfusion.

In the UK, about half of all patients having cardiac surgery are given a red blood cell transfusion after the operation, using up to ten per cent of the nation's blood supply. The proportion of patients having a transfusion is high because blood loss and severe anaemia are common after cardiac surgery and transfusion is the preferred treatment. Blood loss causes anaemia which doctors detect by measuring the red cell count or haemoglobin level - a low level triggers transfusion.

Proteins from salt-loving, halophilic, microbes could be the key to cleaning up leaked radioactive strontium and caesium ions from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant incident in Japan. The publication of the X-ray structure of a beta-lactamase enzyme from one such microbe, the halophile Chromohalobacter sp. 560, reveals it to have highly selective cesium binding sites.

Exposure to hormone-altering chemicals called phthalates - which are found in many plastics, foods and personal care products - early in pregnancy is associated with a disruption in an essential pregnancy hormone and adversely affects the masculinization of male genitals in the baby, according to research led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.