Tag Archives: ears locating sounds

Fighting Fire with Sound?

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June 15, 2016
What’s New, Future Trends
By Daniel Meyers

Fire wears the dual hat of being both our friend and our enemy. Necessary for advanced life, and equally potent to end it, it’s the latter point that has led to finding better and better methods for extinguishing it. Water, chemicals, even blankets…fire suppressants have taken many forms. And now, the practice of fighting fire with sound is showing incredible promise as an effective, fire-fighting tool.

Watch here how students at George Mason University demonstrate a fire-suppressing sound device to extinguish flames.

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Hearing Conservation Program-Yes -No?

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The first step toward solving any noise problem is to define it. To understand what requirements must be implemented according to OSHA’s noise standard [29 CFR 1910.95, it is necessary to determine exposure levels. The following sections provide information about evaluating noise exposure levels:

Indications of a Problem
Walkaround Survey
Workshift Sampling
Instruments Used to Conduct a Noise Survey (App III:A)

Follow the link to OSHA site:  How do I evaluate noise exposure

Workplace INTEGRA, can be a resource for your sampling needs:  Noise Surveys and Dosimetry Studies

 

Brain Cells May Press ‘Pause’ When Hearing

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The ASHA Leader, June 2015, Vol. 20, 16. doi:10.1044/leader.RIB3.20062015.16

Brain cells may be able to “wait” to determine what we hear, according to new research on gerbils at the Laboratory for Auditory Neurophysiology in Leuven, Belgium.

Human ears locate sounds in space by accounting for differences in intensity and timing between signals that reach our two ears. Cells in the brainstem, which receive electrical pulses from the auditory nerve when the cochlea hears sound, are “hyper-specialized” to respond to certain time differences, according to the lab’s Philip X. Joris, who worked with lead author Tom P. Franken on the study, published in Nature Neuroscience.

“For example, one cell may respond to sounds right in front of us, which reach both ears at the same time, while another cell may respond to sounds to our side, which reach the ears with a time difference of half a millisecond,” Joris says. “Depending on which cell is active, we know where the sound source is in space. But how cells compute this time difference has been a matter of conjecture because it is exceedingly difficult to study these cells in the brainstem.”

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