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since part of what drives orphans to seek out care is need the to nurse. Yet among females, the most common foster seal was a mother who had lost her own pup.

Regular nursing may induce ovulation, which in turn could make a female more likely to give birth to her own pup the following season.

What else could explain our own species'obsession with puppies kittens and other baby animals?

How salmon help keep a huge rainforest thrivingthe Great bear Rainforest is vital to the health of the planet.

In this film, ecological economist Pavan Sukhdev, The Nature Conservancy's lead scientist Dr M Sanjayan and camerawoman Sophie Darlington talk about the salmon's unsung role in fertilising the forest.

Dr M Sanjayan, reveal how sea otters eat sea urchins which would otherwise devour the kelp and disrupt the rich web of life that relies on it.

but the gastronomic preferences of future astronauts are the genuine motivation for experiments conducted by chemists John Lioumbas and Thodoris Karapantsios of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

and healthiness while keeping fuss and waste to a minimum. Fully sealed food preparation units have been proposed that dispense with the need for a human chef to do any chopping

(or want to brave the free-falling Vomit Comet aircraft used by space agencies, which is enough to put anyone off their fries),

In the 20th century, grey infrastructure made of concrete and other man-made materials was intended to safeguard public health by transporting waste out of crowded cities.

Â Rather than relying on assumptions about the role of urban vegetation in improving the environment and health,

Critically, there is a growing effort to understand the many and complex roles of urban green space in influencing human health and well-being beyond their effect on the physical environment alone.

This outward expression is accompanied by inner physiological changes like lowered blood pressure, reduced skin conductance and nausea.

Psychologist Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that our disgust response reduces the likelihood of ingesting disease-causing microorganisms in decayed meat, faeces, vomit, or blood.

perhaps the risk of infection from faecal matter is the lesser of two concerns. Laboratory animals, pets,

The most advanced methods of mass production employ harmful antibiotics and genetically modified feed in unnaturally crowded ponds on land.

scientists are developing multiple mixing ponds as wetlands to reduce the toxicity of the brine as well as to cultivate habitat.

Such hypothesis-driven research will promote the type of urbanisation that adds to the health, safety and welfare of residents and their environment.

It's soothing to drink, and at least you are getting something nutritious inside you. This remedy has been around for years in countries where milk is popular.

Until the 1980s, doctors would sometimes recommend milk to patients with duodenal ulcers (in the intestine just beyond the stomach) to help ease their discomfort.

Â Milk is in fact slightly acidic, but far less so than the gastric acid naturally produced by the stomach.

which could explain why people with ulcers typically experience pain a few hours after a meal.

The patients who had evidence of duodenal ulcers, but were not currently experiencing symptoms, produced more acid.

Either way, milk is recommended no longer for people with ulcers because it might do the opposite of soothing them.

The other group ate the usual hospital diet and both groups were offered also additional fruit,

At the end of the four weeks each patient underwent an endoscopy to examine their ulcers. Significantly more people on the standard diet had had ulcers that healed,

while fewer than expected got better in the milk-drinking group. Milk appeared to hinder the healing process.

In 1980,21, 000 adults in the city of Tromso in Norway were invited to join a health study where they would be followed for seven years, during

which time 328 developed peptic ulcers (an umbrella term covering duodenal and stomach ulcers). They found that heavy milk drinkers (defined as four

or more glasses a day) were more likely to develop an ulcer, especially amongst the men.

So was the milk causing the ulcers? The difficulty here is that some people with pain drink milk to ease the symptoms temporarily,

so perhaps they were consuming milk as a result of the ulcer. But the risk was also high in those drinking large quantities of milk,

but settling an upset stomach isn't one of them. If you would like to comment on this article

You can hear more Medical Myths on Health check on the BBC World Service. Disclaimer All content within this column is provided for general information only,

and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional.

Should you put butter on a burn? Using butter to treat burns is an old folk remedy that has been around for centuries.

when the Prussian Surgeon general Friedrich Von Esmarch recommended in his influential 19th century handbook on battlefield medicine that burnt surfaces should be covered with an oil, grease or butter.

prevent infection and help the healing process. Von Esmarch may be credited widely with coming up with the concept of"first aid Â,

but was he right about butter? Plenty of us still use folk remedies, and for some reason burns seem to have attracted more than their fair share of myths and exotic treatments.

Perhaps this is because the immediacy of the pain makes us more desperate for a solution.

Far more recently surgeons at a hospital in The british city of Sheffield noticed a series of cases of children with burns being brought into its casualty department still wearing hot clothes

This inspired them to investigate parents'beliefs about burn remedies. They asked them to imagine what they would do

Only 10%gave an answer considered to be ideal and some suggested remedies which don't work, including the use of butter, milk, cooking oil and toothpaste.

It's easy to see why these folk remedies take hold. Any new burn exposed to the air is incredibly painful

It also seems to help the wound to heal, although researchers are still debating the exact mechanism by which this happens.

and making it easier for doctors to assess the severity of the burn. If you would like to comment on this article

You can hear more Medical Myths on Health check on the BBC World Service. Disclaimer All content within this column is provided for general information only,

and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional.

Artificial food: Incredible or inedible? Pass the salt. And the pepper. And while you're at it, the ketchup too.

Less intellectually nourishing sci-fi food staples include the entire meal in a pill (or dollop or slab of gunk

which Leeloo puts chicken pills into a microwave and a second later pulls out a full roast with all the trimmings.

The idea of all-in-one food pills goes back to the 19th century and has been the subject of much serious research.

at least in medicine, and especially if the benefits aren't immediately clear and quantifiable. The use of antiseptics against germs took decades to catch on,

whereas the use of anaesthetics took just months. To change a doctor's behaviour, you have to take into account his own beliefs and interests.

Unhappy truckers and other algorithmic problems Tom Vanderbilt Nautilus 19 july 2013 On the"travelling salesman Â problem.

How do you calculate the quickest route between a lot of stops? Sounds easy, soon gets difficult.

The global positioning system with which birds are born appears to rely on particles of iron in the ear, nerves in the beak, a chemical reaction in the eyes,

Last time I looked at the effect of a global pandemic, this time I'm looking at how we might change the agricultural landscape by hacking plants.

trying to change its leaf anatomy to that of a C4 plant, which have packed closely veins of two cell types;

What if a pandemic strikes? Over the past century, humans have been transforming the planet so profoundly that we are pushing it into a new geological era, the Anthropocene (the Age of man.

what if our species were hit by a global pandemic? In the Anthropocene we are encroaching on wild lands,

It means that diseases that infect animals have unprecedented an chance to jump across species to us.

Humans are so genetically alike that pathogens easily spread between individuals and across populations. And because we are living in greater numbers and densities than ever before,

and because so many of us travel internationally oe and so much faster oe there's a greater opportunity for pathogens to spread.

Epidemics are certainly not new or unpredictable. A new strain of influenza virus occurs every 1-2 years, for example.

But the sudden global explosion of an epidemic that infects a large number of the population oe a pandemic oe is harder to predict.

We know a pandemic has occurred every 10-50 years for the past few centuries, and the last one was in 1968,

so we're overdue one. Epidemiologists do not talk of whether there will be a new pandemic, but of when it will occur.

Pandemics, which kill a significant proportion of the population have acute and lasting effects on society.

The Black death, a bubonic plague during the Middle ages caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed 30%-60%of Europeans (80%of people in the south of France and Spain) and reduced global population from 450 million to around 350 million.

In a single province of China, more than 4 million people died (90%of the population) in 1334 alone.

Such a toll was socially transformative. Entire cities were depopulated, world trade declined, but so did wars.

In some countries witch hunts rooting out the unknown cause of the plague resulted in minority groups being massacred,

including lepers and Jews. For plague survivors life generally improved, especially for those at the bottom of the ladder.

Peasants benefited from the scarcity of labour to gain better wages (often through revolt), and their crops and cattle spread into unoccupied land giving most people a richer diet.

The Black death also had an environmental impact oe loss of agricultural activity allowed forests to regrow,

the Spanish flu of 1918 killed one in five of those infected, some 40-50 million people worldwide,

The impacts of this pandemic should have been especially severe because unusually, more than half of those who died were young working-age adults,

aged 20-40 (most flu outbreaks kill the very old and young first). However, the global economic slump that resulted from incapacitation

The HIV/Aids epidemic, which also disproportionately effects young, working age men and women, can give some idea of economic impact oe in hard-hit sub-Saharan African countries the economies were estimated to be on average 22%smaller in 2010

So what would be the result of a global pandemic in the 21st Century? The world's population in the middle Ages was just a few hundred million;

Poverty in HIV-hit southern Africa means it has the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

Wouldn't it be great to achieve some of these desirable planetary outcomes without the horrific suffering of a global pandemic?

and numerous food-borne disease outbreaks caused by microbes such as salmonella, E coli strain 0157, toxoplasma and listeria.

herbicides and other harmful chemical contaminants. At that point, vertical farming in tall buildings will replace less productive single-story greenhouses as the source of all city-grown produce.

Rather than being noxious sumps of filth and disease, these sewage plants are popular visitor attractions, odourless greenhouses with the look and feel of a botanical garden (such as Koh Phi Phi Don in Thailand).

Laurie Garrett Foreign policy 24 april 2013 Ten years after Sars, a new virus strikes China, perhaps more deadly,

and certainly harder to contain. The H7n9 flu now evolving in China has a lethality about nine times the mortality rate of the Great Influenza of 1918-19,

and where does it hide? One week, no food S Abbas Raza Aeon 1 may 2013 Couple fast for seven days.

"In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old. Almost nobody knew what it meant.

The diagnosis: brain damage. Â Where uniqueness lies Gary Marcus Nautilus 29 april 2013 Advances in genetics, biology, neuroscience,

Destroying crops, spreading diseases.""Once a wild pig is full-grown, it is invulnerable to almost all forms of predators angry alligators being one possible exception Â. Boars are smart, fast, hard to hunt."

"Unwanted treatment is American medicine's dark continent. No one knows its extent, and few people want to talk about it.

The US medical system was built to treat anything that might be treatable, at any stage of life oe even near the end,

when there is no hope of a cure, and when the patient, if fully informed, might prefer quality time and relative normalcy to all-out intervention.

Â For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser. If you would like to comment on this article

Worm therapy: Why parasites may be good for youjim Turk initially put his symptoms down to stress.

The self-described health nut who was in training to run marathons suddenly found himself unable to jog for more than a couple of minutes before coming to a gasping, staggering halt.

His speech began to slur. Turk, then in his early thirties, blamed the combined pressures of juggling a full-time job,

The diagnosis was obvious: multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune condition in which the body eats away at its own nerve cell casings.

The cure: not known yet. A month later, Turk saw an ad on the news seeking multiple sclerosis patients to try out an unusual new treatment at the University of Wisconsin, in his hometown of Madison.

Patients were being asked to infect themselves with live pig whipworm eggs to see if the parasites alleviated any of their symptoms

or slowed the spread of telltale brain and spine lesions.""I've always had a research interest so

I decided to put my money where my mouth is, Â Turk says.""Plus I was terrified

a professor of neurology, presented him with a vial of clear liquid.""It tasted a little bit salty

At the start of the trial, MRI scans showed patients had an average of 6. 6 active lesions oe scars on the protective layer around nerve cells that disrupt the transmission of electrical messages in the brain and spinal cord.

the lesions rebounded to an average of 5. 8."The beauty of this is that the number of new lesions is really an objective, brutally honest answer,

Â Old friendsfleming's trial in 2008 was the first to infect multiple sclerosis patients with live parasitic worms, also known as helminths,

but others were also investigating their therapeutic potential. The field has its origins in the early 1990s.

Joel Weinstock, now chief of the division of gastroenterology/hepatology at Tufts Medical center in Boston, struck upon the idea during a six-hour delay on the runway at Chicago's O'hare airport."

"Over the years, people had looked for environmental factors that caused inflammatory bowel disease and hadn't found anything, Â Weinstock says."

The price might be the surge in cases of asthma and allergies we've seen in western countries over the past 40 years.

Yet in developing countries, such conditions remain rare. In 1989, David Strachan, an epidemiologist at St george's University in London, published a landmark study proposing that improved hygiene in the developed world could explain trends in hay fever incidence.

Strachan's idea was that changes to sewage treatment, availability of clean water and food,

and a shift away from farming lifestyles decreased our contact with soil, faeces and contaminated food where bacteria and parasites like helminths live.

The rise in allergies and inflammatory diseases may not necessarily be caused by a general lack of microbes in hygienic environments,

while at the same time issuing a chain of anti-inflammatory orders to ensure the response does not get out of hand.

People who survived infection have passed on immune advantages to future generations. In the modern, developed and sterile West, the theory goes,

when Elliott and Weinstock first found that helminths protected mice against colitis, news spread fast.

In one, involving 54 ulcerative colitis patients, 43%of those given pig whipworm eggs improved, compared with only 17%who received placebos.

In a second trial 29 patients with Crohn's disease took whipworm eggs every three weeks. By the end of 24 weeks

79%had reduced disease activity and 72%had gone into remission. Researchers and biomedical companies around the world began to investigate the potential of helminthic therapy for treating conditions ranging from asthma to autism to psoriasis.

Helminthic therapy is still at the experimental stage, but some patients are unwilling to wait.

In 2007, self-infected entrepreneurs Garin Aglietti and Jasper Lawrence founded a worm therapy start-up called Autoimmunetherapies in the US by harvesting hookworms plucked and sterilised from their own faeces,

and charging between $2, 000 to $3, 000 per dose. However in 2009, the Food and Drug Administration defined helminths as biological products that could not be sold before having undergone a series of clinical trials

which they had not. Aglietti set up his own Wormtherapy operation to Tijuana, Mexico, and Lawrence returned to his native England.

Herbert Smith, a financial analyst in New york bought hookworms, and pig and human whipworms from Wormtherapy and Autoimmunetherapies,

either travelling to Mexico or receiving mail-order worms from Lawrence. Smith was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996,

and lost a foot of his intestines to surgeries before he stumbled on one of Weinstock's papers.

Today, he maintains a healthy population of hookworms, which he says have caused a complete remission."

"This therapy could help people who don't have any other treatment options, Â Smith says.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a journalist, also visited Aglietti's Tijuana clinic to receive a dose of 30 hookworms for his allergies and asthma,

and to chronicle the experience in his book, An Epidemic of Absence. Once infected, he suffered diarrhoea and a dull, constant gut pain,

and his allergies failed to improve. After a year and a half he took medication to flush out the invaders."

"The idea is very, very powerful, Â Velasquez-Manoff says.""They just weren't doing anything for me.

Â Researchers across the board are keen to discourage self-infection, which they say puts patients at risk of taking the wrong dose or purchasing contaminated batches.

Fleming says he advises the multiple sclerosis patients who email him at a rate of around one a week against self-infecting with helminths."

"People might say they're getting better or worse, but they don't really know, Â he says."

"Outside a scientific trial, it's a muddle. Â Testing stagenowadays, most researchers investigating helminthic therapies have abandoned bloodsucking hookworms in favour of pig whipworms,

as they have evolved to colonise swine and therefore cannot complete their life cycle within humans. Patients must re-infect themselves every few weeks

but do not risk a chronic infection potentially spiralling out of control, or of accidentally infecting family members."

"Pig whipworm is very kosher, Â Weinstock says. At New york University, immunologist P'ng Loke found monkeys suffering from chronic diarrhoea not only got better after receiving a dose of pig whipworms

but also had significantly different gut microbes post-infection. He is currently enrolling ulcerative colitis patients to repeat the experiment in humans.

Gastroenterologist John Croese, at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, is inoculating 12 coeliac disease patients,

who suffer from gluten intolerance, with hookworms. Gluten is introduced slowly into their diets to see

if the hookworms will suppress the disease's inflammatory response. Back in Wisconsin Fleming is continuing his studies on multiple sclerosis.

He has enrolled another 15 patients for a longer trial with pig whipworms, the results of which are expected at the end of this year.

As for Weinstock and Elliott, they have returned to mouse models, seeking to understand how helminths inhibit disease.

Coronado Biosciences, a Massachusetts-based company, hopes to have results from two large studies being carried out in the US into the use of pig whipworm eggs to treat Crohn's disease by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, German firm Dr Falk Pharma is collaborating with Coronado in a similar trial. Coronado also expects results from its multiple sclerosis trials next year.

"Our most important task now is to identify which diseases to pursue and which patient populations to target, says Karin Hehenberger, Coronado's chief medical officer.

Worm factorynone of these trials have reached phase 3, the final testing stage required to gain approval.

Even if they are successful it is likely to be a few more years before treatments are made available to patients.

Frustrating though it may be for some, developing new modes of therapies simply takes a long time.

Gaining approval for trials, recruiting patients and waiting to evaluate the effects are all time-consuming.

It's not just a case of demonstrating helminthic therapy is safe and effective researchers will also have to figure out how to administer it.

A live organism's many complex molecular interactions with its host may be key to triggering the desired immune-suppressing reaction.

It may therefore make sense to administer helminths as living probiotics. In the case of whipworms this means patients swallowing doses of live eggs;

in the case of hookworms they apply gauzes containing live larvae to their skin.""When you give someone a live worm,

it's like giving them the factory that makes the products and letting the factory do

what it needs to do, Â Elliott says.""Evolution has created already this thing. Â Others oppose this approach."

says Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

and synthesised as pharmaceuticals, just as scientists did with penicillin. Several discoveries have already been made with hookworms

such as a protein that inhibits white blood cell activity and another with anticoagulant properties. Back in Wisconsin, Turk, who has no desire to travel to Mexico

He occasionally speaks to multiple sclerosis support groups about his experiences, encouraging others to take part in research to speed the discovery of better medications.

He is taking interferon beta-1a, a drug that reduces relapse rates, but he hopes the trials of helminthic therapy prove successful,

and would gladly switch to it if it gained approval. Without a tried and tested cure

Turk says he has good days and bad days.""A lot of people look at me and don't think there's anything wrong,

Does cranberry juice stop cystitis? Many women swear by the healing powers of cranberry juice, saying it not only helps cure painful bladder infections,

including cystitis, but also helps prevent future outbreaks as well. Given that bladder infections are one of the most common bacterial infections we face,

some women keep a carton of cranberry juice in the fridge at all times, just in case. Â Men are more fortunate.

They can also get urinary tract infections, but they are fifty times rarer, probably because the male urethra is longer.

The reason cranberries are thought to be special is that they contain substances called proanthocyanidins which are thought to prevent bacteria from sticking to the wall of the bladder.

So it is plausible that drinking cranberry juice could help to prevent cystitis. A systematic review of studies published last year found that products containing cranberries reduced the risk of infection,

particularly in those who repeatedly had infections and those who drank the juice at least twice a day.

Juice seemed to be more effective than tablets containing cranberry, possibly because the active substances are absorbed more easily.

So far, so good oe we have a biological explanation for why cranberry juice might prevent infections,

this time from the Cochrane Collaboration, examined 24 studies on the prevention of urinary tract infections and came to rather different conclusions.

a placebo or even doing nothing. The review authors concede that some small studies showed an effect,

The study in question divided 319 women with recent urinary tract infections into two groups: half were given cranberry juice to drink twice a day for the next six months;

the other half were given a juice placebo designed to look and taste just like cranberry juice in identical cartons,

The placebo was made for the study by the cranberry juice manufacturers Ocean Spray. The result? Drinking cranberries made no difference to the recurrence of infections.

The earlier review had excluded this study because the authors had used a lower threshold to definite a urinary tract infection,

but authors of the later review assessed it to be important enough to include in their study.

Cranberry juice might prevent infections, but if it does the effect seems to be minor at best

To reduce your risk of future infections by a small amount you would need to drink cranberry juice twice a day indefinitely.

But it's estimated that a woman unlucky enough to have two infections a year might be able to reduce that to one a year,

and for people who get a lot of infections this might be worth it. The alternative is tablets,

whether their infection would have got better on its own, or when and if they would have the next bout of cystitis.

But for the moment, it's impossible to say whether cranberry juice is it. If you would like to comment on this article

or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

You can hear more Medical Myths on Health check on the BBC World Service. Disclaimerall content within this column is provided for general information only,

and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional.