Meoww!

Inside the new MTA K-9 training center in Stormville, New York

At a sprawling campus north of New York City, a 3-year-old German Shepherd named Johnny frantically sniffed through seats and luggage bins on an out-of-service commuter rail train trying to catch a whiff of hidden explosive.

When Johnny found a black bag with the faint scent of C-4, commonly used to blow up buildings, he sat statue-still at attention, alerting handler Kevin Pimpinelli of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority police to his discovery. In return, Pimpinelli rewarded him with a prized chew toy.

“In the real world, he can find the explosive before it gets on the train,” Pimpinelli said. "Our job is to try to prevent that device getting in.”

Johnny is one of 50 of the transit authority’s police dogs being trained at its $13 million, 72-acre training center in Stormville, New York, about 70 miles (113 km) north of New York City.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority operates subways, buses, and railroads in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and provides more than 2.7 billion trips each year to travelers, according to the agency’s website.

The canine training center, the biggest facility of its kind in the United States, begins full operations on June 8, 2016,  and will train dogs used by police across the nation.

Amid attacks including the March bombing of a Brussels train station and airport, which killed 32 people, U.S. police agencies see highly trained dogs as key to maintaining security in large public spaces.

Their sharp sense of smell exceeds the ability of humans and machines to detect explosives and track suspects.

“The importance of this facility is growing daily because we get more threats daily,” said MTA Police Lieutenant John Kerwick, who oversees the agency’s police-dog training operations.

The dogs are carefully selected. Only about one in 30 dogs assessed at breeders are chosen for the canine police force. The dogs are mainly German Shepherds like Johnny or Belgian Malinois, high-energy breeds known for a strong desire to work.

HIGHLY TRAINED SNIFFERS

Those handpicked few are trained to detect threats such as explosives or contraband including narcotics, said David Ferland, who heads the United States Police Canine Association (USPCA).

The MTA dog training facility includes rooms modeled after classrooms and bus stations, 26 kennels and a veterinary clinic. Outside, there are nine buses, ponds and train cars at the end of a retired Metro North railroad track. All are used to train the dogs.

While there is no central database tracking the number of police dogs in service in the United States, the USPCA estimates the figure at about 10,000.

Ferland said interest in training police dogs has risen dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, evidence of a sense of urgency in combating similar threats.

“Before 9/11, there were only a handful of these training sites,” Ferland said. “Now, there are training facilities an hour’s drive from every major city in the U.S.”

The Stormville facility will offer initial 12-week courses where dogs learn to detect explosives and the refresher courses that dogs are required to take each month.

The canines are exposed to heights, loud noises, fumes, moving vehicles and other distractions they would face on the job.

Typically they work until about the age of 10, after which they normally go on to live as pets in their primary handlers’ homes.

“They’re like family,” said Officer Keith Flood with his three-year-old black Shepherd-Malinois mix named Doc, after finishing a training exercise. (Reuters)

See more images of the K-9 training center on Yahoo News!

#KnowYourHistory: #Stonewall

Self Care: Sleep

How To Cope with Nightmares

How to Keep a Dream Journal

Making a Dream Journal

Sleep Meditation Music

Teas for Insomnia

Natural Sleep Remedies

Medication Interactions Checker (Make sure you’re okay to take sleep aids before doing so!)

DIY Bubblebath

Foods that can help/harm sleep

Cheap Pillows

Aromatherapy

Guided Meditation

This is what a real, qualified OBGYN will tell you about what women feel when they get an abortion

Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.

Life in Technicolor: Glasses for the colorblind

With so much of our world color-coded, life can be quite tricky without the ability to see the full range of the rainbow.

For the 13 million Americans (and 300 million people worldwide) with color vision deficiency or blindness, living with the inability to detect red, blue, green or a mixture of these colors means having to learn to discern traffic lights or subways lines based on order and patterns rather than color, or having to ask someone whether the piece of meat they’re about to ingest is actually well-done.

However, EnChroma, one of several emerging startups founded by University of California alums, is changing the way people with color vision deficiency experience the world. They make eyewear that corrects for the most common color blindness. 

According to Marc Levin, a neuro-ophthalmologist at UCSF, the lenses work by changing how light is received by the brain for those whose eyes lack sensitivity to red and green light wavelengths. It filters out light that the red and green light-absorbing molecules/photopigments in our eyes sense most similarly. This helps the brain receive more distinct color wavelength information.

While their glasses currently only work for people with red-green color blindness, the company hopes to eventually create lenses that will also help individuals with more severe color vision deficiencies.

GIF source: Valspar Paint

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(Image caption: Because babies born prematurely are still developing, they typically have smaller brains than full-term infants. Shown are depictions of the cortical-surface area of the brain at different points in gestation. Illustration by Eric Young)

Breast milk linked to significant early brain growth in preemies

Feeding premature babies mostly breast milk during the first month of life appears to spur more robust brain growth, compared with babies given little or no breast milk.

Studying preterm infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, the researchers found that preemies whose daily diets were at least 50 percent breast milk had more brain tissue and cortical-surface area by their due dates than premature babies who consumed significantly less breast milk.

The researchers, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, presented their findings May 3 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, in Baltimore.

“The brains of babies born before their due dates usually are not fully developed,” said senior investigator Cynthia Rogers, MD, an assistant professor of child psychiatry who treats patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “But breast milk has been shown to be helpful in other areas of development, so we looked to see what effect it might have on the brain. With MRI scans, we found that babies fed more breast milk had larger brain volumes. This is important because several other studies have shown a correlation between brain volume and cognitive development.”

The study included 77 preterm infants. The researchers retrospectively looked to see how much breast milk those babies had received while being cared for in the NICU. Then, the researchers conducted brain scans on those infants at about the time each would have been born had the babies not arrived early. All of the babies were born at least 10 weeks early, with an average gestation of 26 weeks, or about 14 weeks premature. Because they are still developing, preemies typically have smaller brains than full-term infants.

First author Erin Reynolds, a research technician in Rogers’ laboratory, said in gauging the effects of breast milk on the babies’ brains, the researchers didn’t distinguish between milk that came from the babies’ own mothers and breast milk donated by other women. Rather, they focused on the influence of breast milk in general.

“As the amount of breast milk increased, so did a baby’s chances of having a larger cortical surface area,” Reynolds said. “The cortex is the part of the brain associated with cognition, so we assume that more cortex will help improve cognition as the babies grow and develop.”

Preterm birth is a leading cause of neurologic problems in children and has been linked to psychiatric disorders later in childhood. Rogers and her team plan to follow the babies in the study through their first several years of life to see how they grow, focusing on their motor, cognitive and social development. As the babies get older, the researchers believe they will be able to determine the effects of early exposure to breast milk on later developmental outcomes.

“We want to see whether this difference in brain size has an effect on any of those developmental milestones,” Rogers said. “Neonatologists already believe breast milk is the best nutrition for preterm infants. We wanted to see whether it was possible to detect the impact of breast milk on the brain this early in life and whether the benefits appeared quickly or developed over time.”

Rogers said further investigation is needed to determine specifically how breast milk affects the brain and what is present in the milk that seems to promote brain development. She explained that because all of the babies in the study were born early it isn’t clear whether breast milk would provide similar benefits for babies born at full term.

Lingerie Has A Diversity Problem. Here’s What One Brand Is Doing About It.

A Beautiful Railway Track <3

Untitled by Stanley Huang

This is still—and may always be—the ultimate example of right-wing hypocrisy.