Dr. Saverio Stranges of the Warwick Medical School and colleagues at the University at Buffalo find sleep duration is associated with an elevated risk of a pre-diabetic state — known as incident-impaired fasting glycemia.

The researchers looked at six years of data from 1,455 participants ages 35-79 in the Western New York Health Study. The study participants completed a clinical examination that included measures of resting blood pressure, height and weight. They also completed questionnaires about their general health, well being and sleeping patterns.

“We found that short sleep, less than 6 hours, was associated with a significant, three-fold increased likelihood of developing incident-impaired fasting glycemia, compared to people who got an average of 6 to 8 hours sleep a night,” Stranges says in a statement. “Previous studies have shown that short sleep duration results in a 28 percent increase in mean levels of the appetite stimulating hormone ghrelin so it can affect feeding behaviors. Other studies have also shown that a lack of sleep can decrease glucose tolerance and increases the production of cortisol, a hormone produced in response to stress.”

The study is published in the Annals of Epidemiology journal.

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The study, published online ahead of print issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, finds multivitamin use did not appear to have any beneficial effect on patients’ outcomes but did not have a detrimental effect.

First author Dr. Kimmie Ng, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, says despite conflicting evidence on the efficacy of multivitamins to reduce cancer risk and death, studies suggest approximately 30 percent of Americans take multivitamins — but among cancer survivors, between 26 percent and 77 percent report using multivitamins.

“With such a high proportion of cancer patients utilizing multivitamin supplements in the belief that it will help them fight their cancer, we felt it was important to really examine the data to see what impact multivitamins had on cancer recurrence and survival,” Ng says in a statement.

The researchers asked 1,038 patients to complete a survey. Nearly half responded they used multivitamins during chemotherapy. Of the 810 cancer-free patients who completed the survey six months after chemotherapy, more than half reported multivitamin use.

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Dr. Anna Snelling of the University of Bradford says not drying hands thoroughly after washing can increase the spread of bacteria. Using a conventional electric hand dryer — and rubbing one’s hands together — may contribute to the spread of bacteria.

Snelling and colleagues examined different ways of hand drying — paper towels, traditional hand dryers, which rely on evaporation, and a new model of hand dryer that rapidly strips water off the hands using high velocity air jets — and their effect on bacteria transfer from hands to other surfaces.

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology, finds the most effective way of keeping bacterial counts low, when drying hands, was using paper towels. But if using an electric dryer — the model that rapidly stripped the moisture off the hands was best for reducing transfer of bacteria to other surfaces.

“Good hand hygiene should include drying hands thoroughly and not just washing,” Snelling says in a statement.

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Lead researcher Dr. Anne Matthews of the School of Nursing at Dublin City University in Dublin and colleagues conducted a systematic review 27 randomized controlled trials that involved 4,041 women who were as much as 20 weeks pregnant.

Due to concerns that pharmaceuticals may damage their unborn children, pregnant women are turning to non-drug treatments, including complementary and alternative therapies, Matthews says.

The review finds six studies of acupressure and two of acupuncture showed no significant benefit compared to control groups. However, one study of acustimulation — mild electrical stimulation of acupuncture points done to control symptoms such as nausea and vomiting — did appear to be beneficial.

The review finds limited evidence that ginger can relieve nausea, as can vitamin B6, antihistamines and antiemetic, or anti-vomiting drugs, including the ante-natal drug Debendox.

However, some adverse effects include drowsiness after taking antiemetics and ginger caused heartburn in some people.

The findings are published in the Cochrane Library.

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NASA says scientists use Landsat satellite imagery to map these pine beetle outbreaks and determine what impact the beetle damage might have on forest fires.

University of Wisconsin forest ecologists compared maps of areas hardest-hit by the beetles with maps of recent fires. Their preliminary analysis indicates large fires do not appear to occur more often or with greater severity in forest tracts with beetle damage. In fact, some beetle-killed forest swaths may actually be less likely to burn.

The results appear counter-intuitive, researchers say, but make sense when considered more carefully.

Green pine green needles appear to be more lush and harder to burn, but they contain high levels very flammable volatile oils. When the needles die, those oils begin to break down. As a result, depending on weather conditions, dead needles may not be more likely to catch and sustain a fire than live needles.

Both the beetles and fires hold the potential to significantly change Rocky mountain forests, Wisconsin forest Phil Townsend says, but both are also key to forest health.

“Both fire and beetle damage are natural parts of system and have been since forests developed,” Townsend said. “What we have right now is a widespread attack that we haven’t seen before, but it is a natural part of the system.”

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Lead researcher Julia Bailey of University College London says patients may be unlikely to discuss sexual health concerns because of the sensitivity of the issues, or because healthcare providers have limited time.

Bailey and colleagues reviewed data from 15 studies that tested interactive computer-based interventions — requiring input from the user — involving 3,917 people. The interactive packages used animations, scenarios, simulations and interactive characters.

The review finds interactive computer-based interventions moderately increased knowledge about sexual health issues and had smaller effects on increasing people’s confidence in their actions to protect sexual health, and on actual sexual behavior.

For example, in one study, after an interactive computer-based intervention, condom use from the previous month increased.

The review, published in the Cochrane Library, concludes that interactive computer-based interventions seem as effective as face-to-face interventions for improving knowledge, but the researchers were unable to draw clear conclusions about how interactive computer-based interventions may work.

“Computer packages will not be a magic bullet, but people can access them anonymously and at convenient times, which is especially important for sexual health,” Bailey adds.

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The reconnoitering backpack was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office, an Air Force release said Tuesday.

The backpack is the first system designed to work without having to be strapped to a robot or attached to a rolling cart.

Its data acquisition speed is very fast, collecting data in real time while the human operator is walking, in contrast to existing systems in which the data is collected in a stop-and-go fashion, resulting in days and weeks of data acquisition time, the Air Force said.

The technology will allow military personnel to collectively view the interior of modeled buildings and interact over a network in order to achieve military goals like mission planning, researchers said.

The cutting-edge technology has been successfully tested on the university campus.

“We have already generated 3-D models of two stories of the electrical engineering building at UC Berkeley, including the stairway, and that is a first,” Avideh Zakhor, lead researcher and professor of electrical engineering, said.

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Concavenator corcovatus, meaning “meat eater from Cuenca with a hump,” is a type of dinosaur known as a theropod, the BBC reported Wednesday.

The most primitive forms of theropods have been found in England and now Spain. These finds date from the Lower Cretaceous, somewhere between 100 million and 146 million years ago.

Theropods are a significant group of dinosaurs because it is from this group that birds originated.

“They are a very important group of dinosaurs because within this group there are the birds,” Professor Jose Sanz of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid said.

“This world would not be the same without birds. Birds are really a kind of specialized winged and flying theropod dinosaur,” he said.

The dinosaur’s skeleton features a hump over the ilium, where the hind legs join the spine, and around five bumps on the forearm.

The bumps closely resemble the attachment points for feathers found in modern birds and could be evidence feathers are much older in evolutionary terms than previously believed, scientists say.

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The warning was delivered in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, a society release said.

“Although the public may not be fully aware, we are in the midst of a global shortage of medical and other isotopes,” Robert Atcher, director of the National Isotope Development Center at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in an interview.

“If we don’t have access to the best isotopes for medical imaging, doctors may be forced to resort to tests that are less accurate, involve higher radiation doses, are more invasive, and more expensive.”

Medical isotopes are minute amounts of radioactive substances used to diagnose and treat a variety of diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and gallbladder, kidney and brain disorders.

More than 50,000 patients a day in the United States receive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures using medical isotopes, scientists say.

Eight out of every 10 procedures require one specific isotope, technetium-99m, which has a “half-life” of only 6 hours.

Half-life is the time it takes for 50 percent of a given quantity of a radioactive substance to “decay” and disappear. Like other radioactive isotopes, technetium-99m can’t be stockpiled. It must be constantly made fresh, and distributed quickly to medical facilities, scientists say.

U.S. supplies of technetium have been low for the past 15 months, ever since its main supplier, a Canadian nuclear reactor, shut down temporarily.

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“In the brief testing that we have been able to accomplish, we have no indication that the turbine has killed or even injured any fish,” said Andrew Seitz, project leader and assistant professor of fisheries at the University of Alaska.

Alaska Power and Telephone installed the in-stream turbine near Eagle, Alaska, this summer to tests its ability to provide power for the village.

Seitz is studying the device’s potential effects on fish moving through the river channel, a U of A release said.

The 16-foot wide, 8-foot tall turbine is suspended from an anchored barge in the deepest and fastest part of the river and has four blades that spin at about 22 revolutions per minute.

“The community of Eagle, residents along the Yukon River and Alaska Power and Telephone have all been very supportive of the fish studies,” Seitz said. “Everyone’s biggest consideration is the fish.”

Researchers are using nets to capture fish at the turbine site. They are counted, measured, examined and released back into the river.

Preliminary results show very few fish are passing through the turbine and those that do are not showing any signs of injury, Seitz said.

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