Noise in Biological News

GN Netcom Introduces Innovative Noise Blackout Technology

Jabra BT530 First Product to Feature Noise Blackout(TM) NASHUA, N.H., Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- GN Netcom, the world leader in innovative headset solutions, today unveiled an innovative new generation of noise cancellation technology. Noise Blackout(TM) reduces ambient sound without comp...

Bats pick up rustling sounds against highway background noise

Listening for faint rustling noises made by tasty beetles on a quiet day is simple for bats hunting with their exquisitely sensitive hearing. So try imagining what it must be like trying to locate rustling treats just metres from a roaring highway. It would seem to be almost impossible to pick out...

Role of noise in neurons

Addressing a current issue in neuroscience, Aldo Faisal and Simon Laughlin from Cambridge University investigate the reliability of thin axons for transmitting information. They show that noise effects in ion channels in the brain are much larger than previously assumed ?meaning the fidelity of tra...

Researchers quantify more noise in gene expression

Human identical twins have different fingerprints and march to the beat of subtly different phenotypes, an indication of heterogeneity which led bioengineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to devised computer algorithms that identify the underlying sources of variat...

Noise pollution negatively affects woodland bird communities, says CU-Boulder study

...oulder study shows the strongest evidence yet that noise pollution negatively influences bird populations, ...Biology . "This is the first study to show that noise pollution causes changes in species interactions w...rtment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Since noise pollution can be a major cause of declining bird d...

US-Mexico border wall could threaten wildlife species

...mutton." The scientists say the wall along the U.S.-Mexican border is not the only issue for wildlife. Human activity, vehicular traffic, amplified noise and artificial lighting associated with the barrier can all affect how animals behave. "There is a political reality and a biological reality to th...

Cells use import machinery to export their goods as well

...d for the streetlight to be focused on exactly where we're interested," Simon says. "We get the vesicles at the point of fusion without the background noise of everything else going on inside the cell." For the first time, Jaiswal was able to observe individual post-Golgi vesicles as they deliver carg...

Aluminum-oxide nanopore beats other materials for DNA analysis

...xhibiting superior mechanical properties, enhanced noise performance and increased lifetime over their sili...e nanopore structure and could potentially improve noise performance as well." The nanopore sensors descr...e detection. "Thinner membranes can produce less noise as a molecule travels through the nanopore," said ...

Toward cheap underwater sensor nets

...ndergraduates are hard at work on analog portions of the underwater communications project, including the transmitter power amplifier and receiver low noise amplifier. "The amplifier works, but it is not yet as efficient as Don Kimball's original design or the early simulations," said electrical enginee...

Healing wounds with lasers, vehicles that drive themselves, other cutting-edge optics

... H. Jeff Kimble of Caltech will describe a new effort to counteract thermal noise and improve the sensitivity of interferometers. He and his colleagues argue...ry slight thermally-induced movement of a mirror's surface owing to thermal noise is accompanied by associated changes in other physical parameters, such as ...

Laughing hyenas, wailing levees, the sound of cheese and blaring bagpipes

...stics, a cross-section of diverse disciplines devoted to architecture, underwater research, psychology, physics, animal bioacoustics, medicine, music, noise control, and speech. Journalists are invited to cover the upcoming meeting either onsite in Portland or online through the meeting's World Wide Pre...

Risk of vibration-induced vascular injuries linked to vibration frequency differences

... either 63, 125 or 250 Hz. One control group of five rats accompanied them to the experimental area, to make sure any results seen were not related to noise or change of locale. A second control group stayed in their home cages, uninvolved in the activity. After the last exposure, the scientists examin...

Study compares sound from exploding volcanoes with jet engines

...San Diego speeded up the recorded sounds from two volcanoes and uncovered a noise very similar to typical jet engines. These new research findings provide sc...hysics of how the large-amplitude signals from eruptions are produced. Jet noise is generated by the turbulent flow of air out of a jet engine. Matoza and ...

Physical activity may strengthen children's ability to pay attention

...he flanker test, suggesting that when the environment is more noisy visual noise in this case kids are better able to gate out that noise and selectively attend to the correct stimulus and act upon it." In an e...

Making a point: Picoscale stability in a room-temperature AFM

...ed motion of the tip relative to the sample is corrected on the fly by moving the substrate in the opposite direction. This is the same idea as active noise cancellation headphones, but applied to atomic force microscopy, says Perkins. In its most recent work, the JILA team has controlled the probes pos...

Vanderbilt scientists invent world's smallest periscopes

...al for damaging the engineered cells. According to Janetopoulos, the micropyramids also have a major advantage for single molecule studies. Optical noise is a constant problem when working at the low light levels involved. Being able to pinpoint actual light sources in two or three dimensions allows the...

New models question old assumptions about how many molecules it takes to control cell division

...g the proper response. As with any control system, noise errors, slip-ups, mis-reads can get in the way o...eated a mathematical model to explore the roles of noise in controlling the basic events of the cell cycle ...plex systems. The article, "Exploring the Roles of noise in the Eukaryotic Cell Cycle," is by postdoctoral ...

Singapore-US scientists first to develop revolutionary microchip that uses 30 times less energy

...e fact that, unlike conventional designs that view noise as a nuisance, our design concept embraces noise as a "gem" - this novel technology recycles noise....by boosting the operating voltage to overpower the noise to ensure accurate calculations, leading to higher...

$300,000 donation from BP includes solar vehicle for UH

...ic solar panel augments the vehicle's battery system, giving it more operational range. It offers a quiet, yet powerful mode of transportation with no noise and less pollution than most ATVs. The buggy, with standard four-wheel drive, seats up to four passengers and boasts a load capacity of 880 pounds. ...

A BBVA Foundation project comes up with a system enabling detection of cetacean hearing loss

...mperiled species, due, among other reasons, to the noise produced by artificial sound sources. A number of ...l and gas extraction too have added their share of noise pollution to the marine environment. To date, th...oindicators of the damage caused by human-produced noise in the marine environment, as a first step to comb...

Practice as well as sleep may help birds learn new songs

...t the role of auditory feedback on the bird's learning, the team used white noise at 100 decibels to prevent the birds from hearing themselves. In subsequent...s finding demonstrated the importance of auditory feedback; after the white noise was eliminated, the birds began to learn normally. "There is a very famous...

The 156th Acoustical Society of America Meeting, Nov. 10-14, Miami, Fla.

...ate to a cross-section of diverse disciplines, including architecture, underwater research, psychology, physics, animal bioacoustics, medicine, music, noise control, and speech. Lay-language papers detail some of the most newsworthy results at the meeting. They are roughly 500-word summaries written for...

Acoustical Meeting, Nov. 10-14, 2008 in Miami, Florida

...rwater research, psychology, physics, animal bioacoustics, medicine, music, noise control, and speech. Journalists are invited to cover the upcoming meet...sharpens the nervous system's response to speech particularly in background noise and to emotionally-significant sounds such as the cries of babies. Nina Kr...

BIO-key(R) Awarded PocketCop(R) Contracts From Major Law Enforcement Agencies

...'s silent, text-based messaging functionality provided significant benefit to St. Paul's police officers monitoring street traffic during the RNC. The noise generated by the large crowds and loudspeakers at RNC events and demonstrations made it next to impossible to hear or communicate clearly via radio. P...

The inaudible symphony analyzed

...losions in the vicinity are easy to recognise, for example the explosion of a fuel depot near London in 2005. At home, Evers saw a huge peak above the noise on his computer screen. He knew immediately that something big had happened in England. But the main purpose of his work is the detection of above-g...

156th Acoustical Society of America Meeting, Nov. 10-14, 2008 in Miami

...and buried mines underwater? What is the effect of noise in the home? How does the brain deal with sound? ...gy, physics, animal bioacoustics, medicine, music, noise control, and speech. Journalists are invited t... "Apart from road and air traffic noise, and some noise from neighbors, the most important...

Genes that control cell death fingered in age-related hearing loss

...d Anatomy. "Right now, there is nothing we can do to treat it or reverse it, so prevention is the focus." Frisina advises avoiding exposure to loud noise wherever possible, and wearing ear protection when working with power tools or hunting, for example. Since many medications can damage hearing, patien...

Scientists trace molecular origin of proportional development

...dient so precise, or is it really so precise? "Instead of discounting the variability of the Bicoid gradient among different embryos, we found this noise to be an advantage of the system," said Dr. Ma, also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. "The amount of Bic...

Audience Selected as Silver Winner in This Year's Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards and Winner of the Semiconductors Category

...s a voice processor company that enables clear communications anywhere with noise suppression technology based on the intelligence of the human hearing syste...ember companies of the Open Handset Alliance and the only one with advanced noise suppression technology. Investors in Audience include Vulcan Capital, NEA, ...

Effects of anthropogenic sound on marine mammals -- a research strategy

...its global assessment of cetacean species, released in august 2008, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that ocean noise posed a significant threat. These concerns have reached the larger public through exposure in popular press and media. In spite of growing attentio...

Cranking up the volume

...water. This will increase the amount of background noise in the oceans and could affect the behavior of mar...y boats and ships. Such human-generated underwater noise has increased dramatically over the last 50 years,...s. It could also increase the amount of background noise that they have to live with. There are no long-...

Unique study shows oil, gas seismic work not affecting Gulf sperm whales

... HOUSTON, Aug. 21, 2008 noise can be irritating and possibly harmful for everyth...recent years, there has been concern that man-made noise may be a cause of stress for dolphins, whales and ...ls, but the results of a five-year study show that noise pollution especially...

Grant supports emerging field of massive data analysis and visual analytics

...d number of data points in massive data sets. Dimension reduction is essential for efficient processing of high-dimension data sets while removing the noise in the data. Park is especially interested in developing methods for dimension reduction that exploit prior knowledge in the data sets such as cl...

Ultrasonic frogs can tune their ears to different frequencies

...to tune in to specific sound frequencies at will, Feng said. They can shift to high frequency and ultrasonic hearing when the low frequency background noise of rushing water is too intense for them to pick out the calls of potential mates or rivals, he said. This research likely has implications for hum...

Outdoor enthusiasts scaring off native carnivores in parks

...oring areas. Her study didn't address the reason for their flight, but she thinks it likely that the mere presence of humans disturbs the animals. The noise of humans traipsing and chatting through parks, our smell or just the sight of us could frighten animals away from their homes, Reed said. Between ...

Killer whales, blind bats, discriminating dolphins, mating birds

...s release. HIGHLIGHTS IN THIS RELEASE 1) How noise Affects Marine Mammals 2) Birds Changing Their Tu... 11) Conservation and the Tiger's Roar 1) HOW noise AFFECTS MARINE MAMMALS Effects of sonar and othe...f behavior. The earliest concern was that elevated noise could reduce the range of communication by masking...

Drug reverses mental retardation caused by genetic disorder

...ggest that mice with the mutation cannot distinguish between important and unimportant data. We suspect that their brains are filled with meaningless noise that interferes with learning." "After only three days of treatment, the TSC mice learned as quickly as the healthy mice," said Ehninger. "The rap...

Largest ever acoustics meeting is next month from June 30 to July 4, in Paris, France

...Acoustics Association (EAA), and the 9th Congrs Franais d'Acoustique of the French Acoustical Society (SFA) integrating the 7th EUROpean conference on noise control (euronoise), the 9th European Conference on Underwater Acoustics (ecua) and the 60th Anniversary of the SFA. ...

OSU technologies funded for development

...ize rubber from discarded tires to create sandwich-core composite laminates. The lightweight, load bearing composites will be able to absorb acoustic noise and vibration and provide protection from blast loading. Currently, used tires are employed in basic applications like burning fuel for cement kilns ...

OCAST funds OSU projects with commercial viability

...gineering, received $83,168 for two years. Lu will develop multifunctional composites for the interior panels of aircraft using crosslinked aerogels. noise reduction will be the primary goal of the project. Lu will also test the composite panels for thermal insulation performance and structural load carr...