Quiet piano music helps reduce stress in rats

Quiet piano music helps reduce stress in rats
The blood pressures and sympathetic nerve activities of rats reduced sharply when they listened to Robert Schumann’s Traumerei, suggesting that quiet piano music helps ease stress in rats, according to a recent study. Katsuya Nagai, an Osaka University professor Emeritus who led a group of researchers that conducted the study, says the study using about 70 rats proves the effectiveness of music therapy. According to the study, researchers attached an electrode to the sympathetic nerve in the kidneys of the rats. The researchers gauged how their blood pressures and nerve activities changed after listening to Traumerei and after hearing noises, for an hour each time. The rats’ nerve activities and blood pressures reduced by as much as 32 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively, after listening to the quiet piano piece, the study showed. However, the nerve activities and blood pressures changed little after the rats heard noises or listened to passionate piano music, it showed.

Organic food: An unexpected downside
The boom in restaurants serving local organic produce has come with an unexpected downside: more bugs in your food. Without pesticides to deter them, aphids, ladybugs, caterpillars and beetles are tagging along on the journey from farm to kitchen to dinner table with greater frequency. But the reactions among diners are as diverse as the critters they’re finding on their plates. Some are furious, of course, especially considering they’re already paying more for organic food—but a surprising number, restaurateurs say, are cheered.
To those customers, such uninvited guests are proof that the produce really is fresh and pesticide-free. “I, for one, would much prefer a bug on my plate to pesticide in my bloodstream,” says Ben Long, a communications consultant and foodie from Kalispell, Mont. Sometimes it’s more than just a bug. When Richard Samaniego, chef at California’s Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, opened a box of organic lettuce last year, a frog jumped out. “It was a good thing I found it before we started chopping,” he jokes. And before his guests started eating.
(Newsweek)

Raiding and sharing food as a social tool for chimps
Food sharing may be an
altruistic act, but there is often something in it for the sharer, as well. It can be a way to gain favours, to pursue the opposite sex or even to show off. Researchers have now found evidence of a population of chimps that shares something else: plant foods. And not just any plant foods, but foods from farms and orchards that the chimps raid.
Kimberly J. Hockings of the University of Stirling in Scotland and colleagues observed the behavior of male adult chimps in a village, Bossou, Guinea, in West Africa, over more than two years. Prey animals are rare in the area, so these chimps almost never share meat. And as with other chimp populations, they do not share wild plant foods. In 58 of 59 instances of sharing, Hockings reports in the online journal PLoS ONE, they shared papayas, oranges, cassava and other foods they stole from farms. Most of the sharing involved a male’s allowing a female of reproductive age to take some of the food. So as with instances of meat sharing among other chimps, the aim of most crop sharing by the Bossou chimps appears to be related to attracting the opposite sex.
(NYT)