Petitions & Other News for Animal Lovers
Ask Congress to Fund the Fight to Save the Bats!
Protect the Jaguars' Southwestern Habitat
Stop the Walls of Death that Turtles Face
Tell the US Military to Stop Abusing Animals
Stop the Keystone XL!">
Your voices were heard! More than 100,000 BioGems Defenders called on President Obama to support a ban on the international trade in polar bear parts, and on October 5th, the White House announced it would support the ban.
Crow Saves a Kitten
And a little, interesting from my latest Endangered Earth E-newsletter:
Wild & Weird: Cute Kitten Photos Make You Smarter
According to new research from Japan, those embarrassingly cute pictures of itty bitty kitties you secretly stare at while pretending to be hard at work on your office computer may actually improve your concentration and focus.
Turns out there's an evolutionary function to cuteness -- activating a natural response to behave more carefully in the presence of adorable, fragile babies -- that translates through the matrix of the Internet.
In Japanese experiments human participants were shown baby animals, adult animals or other neutral images and then asked to make visual searches of number matrices, demonstrate their fine motor skills by playing a Japanese version of the game Operation, and given a test to see how well they focused. In all three cases, the people dosed on pictures of cute baby animals outperformed the others, leading researchers to conclude that cuteness does indeed "induce careful behavioral tendencies in users, which is beneficial in specific situations, such as driving and office work."
So go on -- go get yourself a cute fix. It may be better than caffeine.