A + G

Music that soothes you or makes you happy just might have the same effect on your baby.  Exception: Animal and plant studies show that the discordant notes and chaotic pace of rap and guitar-heavy rock seem to interfere with growth in both plants and animals and with brain structure in animals.

way to be first, ohio.  seriously? 

The US state of Ohio has become the first in the country to carry out an execution with a single-drug injection, instead of a combination of three.

Kenneth Biros, 51, was put to death after the US Supreme Court denied his final appeal.

Biros had been convicted of the murder of a 22-year-old woman in 1991.

The new method was introduced because of concerns that prisoners could suffer extreme pain if the first of the usual three drugs fails to work effectively.

Critics say the method - which uses a dose of thiopental sodium and can take twice as long to take effect - is human experimentation. Officials deny that.

‘Experimental use’

Biros was pronounced dead about 10 minutes after the injection was administered, the AP news agency reports. On average death took seven minutes under the previous method in Ohio.

The total process of Biros’ execution lasted for about 43 minutes, AP said, adding that the execution team took about 30 minutes to find a suitable vein for the insertion of the needle.

The change of approach follows a failed attempt to execute a prisoner in Ohio in September, when officials struggled for two hours to try to find a suitable vein into which to inject the drugs.

“The EPA signaled last April that it was inclined to view heat-trapping pollution as a threat to public health and welfare and began to take public comments under a formal rulemaking. The action marked a reversal from the Bush administration, which had refused before leaving office to issue the finding, despite a conclusion by EPA scientists that it was warranted.”

onemoretimewithfeeling:

(via psychotherapy)

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

“It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, “which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli.”

Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting. So it makes sense that videos centered on babies and young animals have amassed more than a billion clicks on YouTube. This is not just a case of kids watching kid stuff, either: more than 80 percent of the people who go to YouTube are at least 18 years old, according to the site’s own demographics study.

Big business is not blind to the power of cute. A good example is the subtle evolution of the signature advertising character of the last decade, the geico Gecko. In 1999, when the creature made its debut, it was a slithery reptile that walked on all fours. Since then its creators at the Martin Agency, an advertising firm based in Richmond, Virginia, have transformed it into something much cuter: the little guy is now fully anthropomorphized, with a more rounded head, big eyes, and other characteristics we unconsciously associate with infants who need our care.

The gecko’s cuteness tricks you into forgetting that it represents something that’s not cute in the slightest—a giant insurance company, which must deal in matters most uncuddly, such as injury, death, and arguments over claim payments.