Posts by Norman

Life is like a box of sound clips. (Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann) WRITTEN BY Matthew Sedacca December 24, 2016 When slurping on “hot dry” noodles from a dingy, styrofoam box, a lot of senses come together to create the full experience of the meal. First, you see the bright red vegetables and thick sauce coating the noodles. Then there’s the fragrant…

Airline passengers who eat meals vary in their ability to taste sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavors. In studying how airplane noise affects the palate, Cornell food scientists have found sweetness suppressed and a tasty, tender tomato surprise: umami. A Japanese scientific term, umami describes the sweet, savory taste of amino acids such as glutamate…

Hearing loss from noise can happen to anyone at any age, and it can take years to be noticeable. A 2017 study of U.S. adults aged 20 to 69 years shows that nearly one in four has signs of possible hearing loss from noise in one or both ears based on features of their hearing…

Researchers discover a drug combination that can regenerate hair cells in the inner ear. Anne Trafton | MIT News OfficeFebruary 21, 2017 Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals that allow us to hear speech, music, and other everyday sounds. Damage to these cells is…

Australian smart earbuds maker Nuheara has announced a university-backed trial to study the effectiveness of its noise-filtering IQbuds in assisting children on the Autism spectrum or with auditory processing difficulties. The noise-cancelling wireless earbuds are designed to stream music from a mobile device via Bluetooth, but their built-in signal processing technology can also filter out…

Two engineering students from George Mason University have invented a new fire extinguisher, capable of putting out flames by manipulating sound waves. The sonic fire extinguisher by two final-year undergraduate engineering students, Seth Robertson and Viet Tran, uses sound waves spread through a mobile subwoofer gun to put out flames, rather than the chemical compounds…

Is It Safe to Turn Down the Volume of Hospital Alarms? New Study Chimes In: ‘Yes’ Hong Kong—The classic belief that hospital alarms should be loud might be a mistake, a new study suggests. The overabundance and high volume of hospital alarms can have deleterious effects on patients and providers, impairing clinician performance and possibly…

November 29, 2016  MELBOURNE’S outer southeast is Victoria’s noisy car capital, with hundreds of drivers nabbed for exceeding restrictions. Holden Commodores and sporty Nissan Skylines are the most common ear-­splitters. Blokes are almost ­always behind the wheel. Environment Protection Authority Victoria data provided to the Herald Sunshows more than 5000 noisy vehicle notices, ordering drivers…

(Left to right): M. Nafi Toksöz, professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); Oral Buyukozturk, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); and Hao Sun, a postdoc in CEE. The …more When a truck rumbles by a building, vibrations can travel up to the structure’s roof and down…

Tuning the instrument: Spider webs as vibration transmission structures Summary: Two years ago, scientists revealed that, when plucked like a guitar string, spider silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies, carrying information about prey, mates and even the structural integrity of a web. Now, a new collaboration has confirmed that spider webs are…