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What's new. What's hot. What they're saying. |
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SOUND POWER: Fighting Cancer (& Insomnia), Finding Landmines Lurking under the soil of war-torn lands like the Balkans, Rwanda and Afghanistan are literally millions of land mines. The metal ones are easy to find with standard detectors. The problem is that many mines are largely plastic, with very little metal in them. Turning up the sensitivity enough to detect these bits of metal causes a conventional detector to give innumerable false alarms from harmless metallic debris in the soil. A new technology uses sounds to find the real dangers without wasting time on the debris. A recent article in the New York Times (March 25 2004) reports that new systems "shake the surface of suspected mine fields with gentle seismic waves." Scientist Dimitri Donskoy of New Jersey's Stevens Institute of Technology explains that mines "can have many shapes, but they all have this flexible [plastic] casing, and they all vibrate differently than the objects around them." A combination of sensors can detect the different sonic signatures and point to possible mines. There are an estimated 45-60 million unexploded mines around the world, causing about 10,000 casualties each year. Read the New York Times article "Shake a Minefield" at Cyterra.com, or on the Times site [fee required]
A new clinical trial has shown that for some cancer surgeries, sound may make a better scalpel than steel. Ultrasound - the sound used to image fetuses in the womb - usually passes harmlessly through human tissues, but when given higher energy and more focus, it can concentrate heat enough to kill cells. The Science journal Nature has reported that clinical trials in France have found that a sonic scalpel can be directed precisely against cancerous tumors with less damage to surrounding, healthy tissues. The French study involved prostate cases in which conventional surgery would have been difficult. Although 5-year survival rates were unchanged, side effects (such as incontinence) were reduced from 80% to 8%. The new study adds new evidence that ultrasound can be useful against tumors in a variety of places in the body. Read the Nature feature, "Silent Sound Zaps Cancer"
Lower energy sounds from Frank A. Prince are claimed to provide exceptional rest. Print advertisements for his "Speed Sleep" CD claims that listeners will experience "a nap on steroids… the equivalent of a deep relaxed sleep in just 25 minutes." The ads also mention an unspecified but "scientifically proven technique to take you down and wake you up refreshed and relaxed."
Visit Speed Sleep at their own site http://speedsleep.com/ Browse the CD at Amazon.com, including customer reviews, or at a site with more customer reviews (including an actual description of what happens during the CD - breathing and stretching exercises, and guided imagery, with repetitive background music) Finally, WIRED magazine reports that "labels keep making music louder - and the sound worse." The January issue explains that engineers have been using compressors and limiters to pack more volume into the same 16 bits of audio information that encode each moment of music on a CD. "Done well," WIRED reports, "this can boost the volume without sacrificing punch, definition, or clarity. Problem is, it's usually done poorly." WIRED examines some examples of recent hits and ancient (by CD standards) recordings back to 1980 to illustrate the encoded waveforms. The newest examples all showed "squashed" peaks and extreme distortion, leading to loss of clarity and punch. Ironically, because radio stations already compress what they broadcast, the label's tricks don't really cause a song to jump out of the din. Read the WIRED magazine article, "Pump up the Volume" While you're at it, learn more about hearing damage and loud music |
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