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Breast milk contains bacteria. That much is known. Some studies (although not, alas, the Human Microbiome Project) have even characterized the bacterial community found in milk. But how does the composition of such a community vary among women? And how might it change over the course of lactation?

Lights, camera, action! If you wandered onto a set filled with cameras, mass spectrometers, and detectors that enable scientists to see fragments otherwise invisible, you may believe this is an episode of Crime Scene Investigation! In reality, this is the scene of the new frontier of milk analysis.

Keeping funding agencies and researchers properly in the loop, Peggy Neville, who recently retired from the University of Colorado, Denver, has published a review in which she and her coauthors run through four key research priorities in the field how the components of breast milk effect an infant’s growth and health, how they impact an infant’s brain and behaviour, some key issues of mammary gland biology and, finally, how milk research can help infants born pre-term to obese or undernourished moms.

If a bacterium walks into a Bar & Grill, what does he order to eat? If there are any simple sugar molecules on the menu, such as glucose, galactose, or mannose, then he’ll order a plate of them. But given these simple sugars are the first choice of pretty much any type of bacteria, the Bacteria’s Bar & Grill is likely to run out quickly.

Imagine a dairy cow without a lactational dry period. Most people would say it’s science fiction, but the discovery of bovine mammary stem cells perhaps brings this possibility a little closer to a reality.

Human milk fat is made up of over 150 different types of fatty acids. While the mammary gland is able to synthesize many of these fatty acids, others must be supplied by fats in the mother’s diet. As human mothers are not consuming identical diets, it is not surprising that human milk fatty acid profiles vary widely among populations.

When is a milk protein not just a protein? Well, most of the time. Most proteins in milk are actually “glycoproteins”–protein and carbohydrates linked together. If you want to know what’s so great about a bunch of sugar molecules hooking up with a protein, read more.

Food is awesome. Most of us enjoy eating food. That’s because when we ingest food-particularly foods rich in sugars, fats, and salt-the dopaminergic “reward” circuitry in the brain is activated. This triggers feelings of pleasure.

As dairy animals go, Holstein cows are record breakers. They produce more milk than any other breed or species, enough to fill a large tank truck over the course of their lifetimes. But the details of what’s in their milk isn’t entirely clear. Among the mystery ingredients are those that reside within exosomes, tiny membrane-bound packages that tote around proteins from their host cell.

While we have long known that prebiotics can be beneficial for gut health, surprising new studies suggest that milk-derived prebiotics may also affect our happiness and our love life.

If a kid eats a mound of candy for breakfast, he’ll probably behave differently than if he had eaten eggs and toast. Bacteria, it turns out, are not so different.

Milk is everywhere. From the dairy aisle at the grocery store to the explosive cover of the Mother’s Day issue of Time magazine, the ubiquity of milk makes it easy to take for granted. But surprisingly, milk synthesis is evolutionarily older than mammals. Milk is even older than dinosaurs.

Spock: “Captain, it’s a unique liquid formulation taken by their young to accelerate growth and development, enhance deductive reasoning and it protects them from alien invasions.”

Kirk: “Can we use the replicator to make enough to save them?”

Body fat is not just for buffering us from famine, keeping us warm during winter, and causing our self-recrimination during swimsuit season. Our body fat is also an integral part of our endocrine signaling system. The emerging literature offers compelling insights into maternal hormones, their transfer via milk, and their consequences in the developing neonate.

Like the moms who produce them, human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) juggle many different tasks. As we continue to discover their functions, their to-do list continues to grow. In a recent review, Jantscher-Krenn and Bode list HMO’s well-established jobs and shift the focus onto new ones.

The Indy 500 is perhaps the most famous car race in the United States. Unlike every other sporting competition in the world, the legendary 500 mile car race is celebrated with the victor drinking not Champagne, but rather a bottle of fresh milk! The latest research suggests that the term “500” may have more to do with the milk, than with the miles.

What if the saying “you are what you eat” became “you are what you and your parents ate”? The written slate of life’s experiences may not be completely wiped clean between generations. How would this knowledge influence our behavior as humans? How would it change livestock production systems?

Imagine if you spent every minute of every day reading scientific articles that have the keyword “milk” associated with them. Suppose you read one article per hour, 24 hours a day. Even with this impossible regimen, you could not cover even half of the milk-related articles published each year. In 2011, there were over 20,000 journal articles published with the keyword “milk” in the PubMed, CAB Abstracts, Agricola, and FSTA databases.

The purpose of “SPLASH! milk science update”, IMGC’s innovative newsletter, is to make it easier for you to stay up-to-date with the scientific literature. Much easier.