Dairy cows produce more milk when listening to REM’s “Everybody Hurts” or Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” than when subjected to Wonderstuff’s “Size of a Cow” or the Beatles” “Back In The USSR” a new study by music research specialists at the University of Leicester has found.

Their milk yield rose by 0.73 litres per cow per day when they were exposed to slow music rather than fast music. The results revealed a three per cent increase in output when slow rather than fast music was played.

Dr. [Adrian] North said, “We have found that cows respond to a pleasant auditory environment by producing more milk. It seems that slow music had the effect of alleviating stress and relaxing the animals which resulted in greater milk yields.”

Additional funding for research is intended to address several other relevant questions, including preferred instruments, benefits for other species (presumably farm species), whether the quality of the audio reproduction has an effect, other aspects of music other than tempo.

For Science!

Biology Online via Neatorama.

In a study published this week in the journal Current Biology, [neuroscientist Aaron] Seitz worked with 19 [baseball] players on the University of California, Riverside, baseball team, and showed that his app UltimEyes lengthened the distance at which the players could see clearly by an average of 31 percent.

After using the app for 30 25-minute intervals, players saw an improvement that pushed many of them beyond normal 20/20 vision, including seven who attained freakishly good 20/7.5 vision—meaning that at a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.

Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.

“Within the last decade or so we’ve started to learn that brain fitness is a bit akin to physical fitness,” Seitz says. “If we exercise our brain in the proper ways, pretty much everything that the brain does should be able to be improved.”

Top image via ThinkStock.
Bottom image via UltimEyes.
Via Popular Mechanics.