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It’s official – cats despise your music collection

<p>To the long list of things your cat despises about you, you can now add your music collection. <a href="http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/S0168-1591(15)00060-X/abstract?con&amp;dom=pscau&amp;src=syndication" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Scientists in the United States have discovered</a> there is a feline preference for “species-appropriate” music – purring tempos and sliding wails are the things that soothe the average cat.</p> <p>Two psychologists, Charles Snowdon and Megan Savage, and a composer, David Teie, teamed up for the project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. They created three purpose-written melodies and tested them out on a group of 47 domestic cats, also compared in “human” music by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Gabriel Fauré.</p> <p>The cats showed trademark disdain for the great composers but when “their” tunes came on they reacted positively rubbing the speakers with their faces.</p> <p>“We looked at the natural vocalisations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices,” says Snowdon. “We incorporated tempos that we thought cats would find interesting – the tempo of purring in one piece and the tempo of suckling in another – and since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music.”</p> <p>The same team of researchers has done this sort of thing before. In 2009, they showed tamarin monkeys ignored human music but were calmed by music tailored for them.</p> <p>They say that the finding could provide a way to soothe the nerves of animals in zoos and other forms of captivity.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/its-official-cats-despise-your-music-collection/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cosmosmagazine.com</a> and was written by Bill Condie.</em></p>

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"Please keep your hatred to yourselves": Pink hits back at 'parenting police' in angry online post

<p>Pink has defended her two children from backlash after she shared a photo of the pair at a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.</p> <p>She’s known to speak out against those who offer her parenting advice, and this time was no different. The singer was in Germany to perform as part of her <em>Beautiful Trauma</em> world tour, and while there, she posted a number of photos featuring her two kids Willow Sage, 8, and Jameson Moon, 2.</p> <p>One of the images showed the two running through the city’s memorial, with many fans taking offence saying the act is offensive to those who died.</p> <blockquote style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz5lC96gVed/" data-instgrm-version="12"> <div style="padding: 16px;"> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div> </div> </div> <div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display: block; height: 50px; margin: 0 auto 12px; width: 50px;"></div> <div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style="color: #3897f0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 550; line-height: 18px;">View this post on Instagram</div> </div> <p style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a style="color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz5lC96gVed/" target="_blank">Berlin, I love you. #holocaustmemorial #panamarestaurant #cocktailclasses #history #herstory #worldtour and for all of the comments; these two children are in actuality Jewish, as am I and the entirety of my mothers family. The very person who constructed this believed in children being children, and to me this is a celebration of life after death. Please keep your hatred and judgment to yourselves.</a></p> <p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A post shared by <a style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/pink/" target="_blank"> P!NK</a> (@pink) on Jul 14, 2019 at 6:57am PDT</p> </div> </blockquote> <p>“Berlin, I love you,” Pink wrote. “And for all of the comments; these two children are in actuality Jewish, as am I and the entirety of my mother’s family. The very person who constructed this believed in children being children, and to me this is a celebration of life after death. Please keep your hatred and judgement to yourselves.”</p> <p>The mother-of-two referenced Peter Eisenman, the man behind the Berlin memorial. Speaking to <em>BBC</em> in 2017, the architect said that he does not find children playing at the memorial to be disrespectful.</p> <p>“People have been jumping around on those pillars forever. They’ve been sunbathing, they’ve been having lunch there and I think that’s fine,” he said. “It’s like a Catholic Church, it’s a meeting place, children run around, they sell trinkets. A memorial is an everyday occurrence, it is not sacred ground.”</p> <p>But despite his views, Eisenman made sure to mark a clear line of difference between the memorial he designed and burial sites such as Auschwitz, which he said are “a different environment.”</p> <p>After ongoing hate comments against her parenting style, Pink made the decision to limit the amount of posts about her kids.</p> <p>“People went as far as saying, ‘Someone should call Child Services,’ because he didn’t have a diaper on, and ‘How dare I?’ – just some of the nastiest things,” she revealed on <em>The Ellen DeGeneres Show</em>. </p> <p>“I cried so hard after that because I like to share my family … I’m prouder of my kids than anything I’ve ever done and I just won’t share them anymore. I won’t do it.”</p>

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