“These findings could help further our understanding pornography addiction and related disorders, such as erectile dysfunction in the absence of pornography,” said researcher Steven Platek, an evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. “These findings could also lend to the scientific inquiry about sexual infidelity.”

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“It’s essentially a Viagra-like drug for women in that diminished desire or libido is the most common feminine sexual problem, like erectile dysfunction is in men,” reports John Thorp Jr., a principal investigator in the studies and the McAllister distinguished professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

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A startup called Vitality Inc. designed a pill bottle system that automatically reminds you when it’s time to take your pills, so you won’t forget.

With Vitality’s system, when a pill-bottle cap is opened, it uses a close-range wireless signal to tell a base station in the home. That station, which looks like a night light, essentially has a cell phone inside that can send messages through AT&T’s network.

If the bottle isn’t opened at the appointed time, the cap and night light start blinking to remind the owner to take the medication. If that doesn’t serve as enough of a hint, they start playing jingles as well. If the bottle stays unopened, the night light will send a message to Vitality’s system, which can then place an automated phone call or send a text message with a reminder.

That points to another possibility opened by the wireless bottle cap: making the pill-taking routine more than just a matter between the patient and the bottle. Vitality’s system can be set to alert a relative if someone isn’t taking medicine.

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From the obvious health-related effects of lack of sleep, such as obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and shorter lives. There’s even new findings that lack of sleep causes Alzheimer’s disease plaques, albeit in mice. Worse, long-term lack of sleep may cause changes in the brain that may stay permanently, which may predispose people to mental disorders like depression.

Just one night of short sleep has been shown to increase levels of inflammatory chemicals in the blood (SN: 10/11/08,p. 14) and increase hunger-promoting hormones. A week of getting just two hours less sleep per night than usual changed the way people in one study responded to glucose, mirroring a change seen in people who develop diabetes.

And lack of sleep can also have immediate injurious or fatal consequences: The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration estimates that drowsy-driving crashes result in about 40,000 nonfatal injuries and 1,550 deaths each year, probably a conservative estimate. Now, scientists are trying to understand not only how sleep deprivation affects driving performance, but also why one sleepy person might drive fine while another becomes a road menace.

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But both Man and Payne also acknowledged that there are scientific obstacles to antibiotic research that cannot be solved by incentives alone. A deadly new class of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — so-called gram-negative bacteria — have a protective layer that has largely stymied drug developers. Drug-resistant bacteria “have multiple defense mechanisms to new drugs,” says Man. “There are difficult technical challenges.”

To Cars, the scientific challenges are more worrying than the financial obstacles. “Even if we got the incentives right, there’s a knowledge gap that needs to be filled,” he says. “The pharmaceutical companies have already picked the low-hanging fruit and developed drugs for the ‘easy’ bacteria. We are facing a rapidly spreading pandemic. And we are running out of ammunition. We need to do something now.”

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Estrogens can fuel the growth of many tumors, even in the prostate–and estrogen can do this at amazingly tiny concentrations. Identifying how estrogens’ prevalence varies by milk type, and in what chemical form the hormones occur, required a new assay, which the NCI scientists describe in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Chromatography B.

Using that technique, they showed that the mélange of estrogens varies widely between milks. Whole milk contained the smallest quantity of estrogens, and amounts ascended from 2% to skim and buttermilk. In all of these milks, the majority of estrogens had undergone a minor chemical modification, rendering them less directly bioavailable and less hormonally active.

However, these modified, or conjugated, estrogens are not inert, and they can be converted back to their more potent parent compounds.

What’s more, the NCI scientists note, studies by others have shown that relative to free, bioavailable estrogens, conjugated ones take longer to get from the gut into the blood.

Veenstra’s team concludes that compared with free estrogens, milk’s conjugated ones “are likely to have longer half-lives.”

Overall, skim milk had the smallest quantity of free estrogens. However, the conjugated type that dominated skim milk’s profile, 2-hydroxyestrone, is known to be one of the most reactive and potentially risky of the metabolites, notes Xia Xu, a toxicologist on the NCI team. That metabolite’s concentration in fat-free milk was second only to buttermilk’s.

Dermatologist F. William Danby, who teaches at Dartmouth Medical School, also worries about other sex hormones in milk—the “male” androgens.

While estrogens may fuel tumor growth in reproductive tissues, certain androgens—ones that Danby refers to as 5alpha-reduced androgens—“have the capacity for increasing the number of estrogen receptors.” In the January/February Dermato-Endocrinology, Danby notes that milk contains at least one receptor-proliferating androgen: 5alpha-pregnanedione.

Extra receptors, he explains, permit more estrogen—including any from milk—to unlock the cellular machinery that can turn tumor growth on. In other hormone systems, when excess hormone shows up, the body often cuts back on its production. Because the body has had relatively little evolutionary time to adapt to dietary sources of the 5alpha-reduced androgens, Danby says, no such feedback system has evolved.

“And this is probably the most important thing,” he says. Milk-derived hormones “are being poured into a system that didn’t anticipate them”—at least in adulthood.

One of the most provocative aspects of the milk story is its impact on insulinlike growth factor 1. Many studies have linked elevated concentrations of IGF-1 with cancer risk. Not only is milk a rich source of the substance, but people who drink milk also end up with more IGF-1 in their blood.

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