What microbes are lurking in the Boston subway system? A team of scientists armed with sterile cotton swabs and a bit of soap rode the Red, Orange and Green lines of the T to find out. What they discovered surprised them. It turns out that the slick metal poles and well-worn hand grips used by hundreds of thousands of riders each day are not hotbeds of pathogenic bugs as the researchers originally suspected. Instead, they say the microbes on most of the sampled surfaces — including subway seats, touch screens and the walls of indoor and outdoor ticketing machines — look a lot like what you'd find on healthy human skin.

Lab-grown bones implanted in pigs

The pigs, all 14 of them, are fine. Given that they were retrofitted with bone grown in a laboratory, that was a pleasant surprise. "The pigs woke up, and a half-hour later, they were eating," said Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a professor at Columbia University. Vunjak-Novakovic and her colleagues have managed to create living bone from stem cells. They reported their results in Science Translational Medicine. Clinical trials in humans are at least three years away.

Sleep issues in men tied to diabetes risk

Men who do not get enough sleep — or get too much — may have an increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, a new study suggests. Researchers studied 788 healthy men and women participating in a larger health study, measuring their sleep duration using electronic monitors and testing them for markers of diabetes — how well pancreatic cells take up glucose and how sensitive the body's tissues are to insulin. The study is in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. The average sleep time for both men and women was about seven hours. As the men diverged from the average, in either direction, their glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity decreased, gradually increasing the deleterious health effects. There was no such association in women.

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