Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019 i Popular Science

WHAT WOULD YOU PUT in your dream home? A pool? A wine cellar? For the 48 million Americans with some degree of hearing loss, practical considerations can trump showy add-ons. Instead of installing a basement ball pit, for instance, you might add a doorbell that vibrates your phone when someone’s there. We’ve used simple tweaks—and theoretical gizmos based on emerging tech—to build a house that doesn’t assume you can hear. Aging boomers and lifelong earbud addicts could help give some of these design principles an increasingly universal appeal. But even if your senses stay pitch-perfect, consider how a few changes could make your house more accessible—and make life easier for everyone. THE GREATEST ROOM A counter facing into the living area keeps the cook from missing any action. Appliances with…

ACOUSTICIANS SOMETIMES speculate about how conversations might carry on alien worlds. Of course, you’d have no time to chat if you stood in the open air on Mars: Your blood would boil you to death in seconds. But what about those final screams? No matter where you are, your voice is a product of how swiftly pressure waves move through your larynx and the frequency at which your vocal cords vibrate. But when shouted into different gases of varying densities, the same noises take on new forms. Here’s how a few extra-terrestrial atmospheres could change your tune. Earth: Human vocal cords quiver at frequencies adapted to a Goldilocks atmosphere—not especially dense or light. Our air’s plentiful nitrogen and scant carbon-dioxide molecules don’t absorb many vibrations, so sound also happens to…

NATURE PUTS EVERY CHIRP in its proper place. Avian sounds—flutish trills, alarmlike buzzes, and one-note squawks alike—are immediately absorbed, reflected, and scattered by everything in a bird’s habitat. Nearby leaves or branches, canyon walls, and even the wind influence notes, so over time, species tailor songs to suit those surroundings. Some minimize echoes by putting more space between notes, while others use low frequencies that travel farther. Here’s how some birds have tweaked their waveforms. Fig. 1 Wood thrush This three-part call often consists of soft, low-pitched phrases flourished with a final, elaborate trill—a complex tune compared with other thrushes. The intricacy makes the tune susceptible to warping when it hits vegetation, so males manage by singing from the lower canopy or midstory of forests, where there’s less obstruction. Fig.…

MOST LIGHTNING JUST bounces around within its cloud of origin. But the rogue charges that escape are enough to dazzle observers, inspire awe and fear (which is fair—the zaps do kill a few dozen people in the US every year), and make some magnificent thunder. A typical cloud-to-ground strike lasts for just a fraction of a second. Here’s how the short but brilliant lifetime of a bolt goes down. 1/ELECTRONS BOUNCE The show starts in a thunder head, where ice particles collide so fast, they knock off each other’s electrons. That leaves positive charges hanging near the top of the cloud, while negative ones accumulate in the middle. 2/DISCHARGE EMERGES Energy zipping between opposing charges forms bolts. Given enough buildup, electricity escapes the cloud in a series of cascading branches…

HUNTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS KNOW THAT ONE OF the best ways to observe a wild animal is to lure it in by speaking its native tongue. Most creatures avoid humans, but when they hear a mating call or a cry for help, they’ll likely come check it out. Gobble, quack, and bleat your way to a close encounter with these tools. ELK Bull elk can weigh more than 700 pounds, but they emit surprisingly high-pitched sounds that taper off to a low grunt. Produce calls convincing enough to attract them with the Primos Bullet Bugle. Detach the blue silicone mouthpiece to clean it or swap it for a new one if it wears down. DUCK The 4-inch-long Zink PH-2 works much like a musical instrument—practice will definitely help you hit the…

STANDING TOO CLOSE TO THE SPEAKERS at a concert or heavy machinery at work can permanently damage your hearing. A solid set of plugs will protect your eardrums, but ensuring you have enough noise reduction is crucial. Consider these options—each blocks an increasing number of decibels—for everything from flying to wielding power tools. 1 17 decibels From crying babies to the drone of the engines, an airplane cabin is loud. Alpine’s FlyFit thermoplastic plugs include valve-like internal filters that absorb ambient noise and may help regulate pressure during ascent and descent. Fortunately, they’re not so powerful that you’ll miss announcements or the chance to finally order that soda. 2 22 decibels Noise above 105 dB can cause hearing loss within minutes, and live music can easily hit that mark. A…

Pings. Buzzes. Rumbles. Booms. Hums. Bumps in the night. Sounds of unknown origin can be more than unsettling; they can inspire decades of mythos and fear—and obsessive scientific inquiry. Some cases of enigmatic noise are now closed, like the southern Pacific “bloops” detected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hydrophones in 1997 and finally, in 2005, tied to Antarctic icequakes. But other cacophonous culprits remain at large. From jarring radio broadcasts to harmonious dunes, here are some of the world’s great sonic mysteries. The Loneliest Whale When the U.S. Navy gave scientists access to a network of hydrophones built in the 1950s to eavesdrop on Soviet subs, researchers discovered a surprising song. It followed a beat (and migratory path) reminiscent of a blue or fin whale. But while those species…

GIBI ASMR “This genre is about a lot more than hushed voices and tingles. I get a sense of calm and euphoria from cosplay personal-attention videos, in which people dress up like characters and look, speak, and gesture directly into the camera. Others enjoy the Korean genre mukbang, where hosts eat huge amounts of food near a mic. That doesn’t seem like traditional ASMR to me, but it makes a lot of people happy. It’s exciting to see scientists begin to recognize what I’ve always believed: that ASMR is not just sounds, but also the visual experience of hands and other gentle, coordinated movements.” OLIVIA KISSPER ASMR “I happened across the phenomenon in 2013 while studying psychology, with a focus on the spiritual and sublime. I was shocked that no…

I don’t remember learning to echolocate. When I was an infant, I had cancer and had to have my eyes removed. I started clicking my tongue simply by instinct. Now I teach my methods to other blind people—adults, kids—to help them move around unassisted and regain independence. When I click my tongue, the sound waves echo back. The longer the time delay between the noise emitted and the return, the farther away an object is. My brain operates differently from that of people who don’t have this skill, and I’ve had it scanned by scientists who study this ability. Their work helps us refine our teaching methods to help more people. It also gives the process more validity. A lot of what they learned are things I would have thought…

CLAMOR COMES IN MANY PACKAGES, from abstract waveforms to countless spoken words in thousands of languages to mathematically complex values like the decibel. With such cryptic disguises, it’s no surprise that noise plays tricks on us. Reveal the truth with this trio of matching games. [WAVEFORMS] In the studio, recorded audio appears onscreen as waveforms, as shown below. Can you pair the spoken words with their corresponding squiggles? 1. Silence 3. Popular Science 2. ASMR 4. Hiccup 5. Noise [ONOMATOPOEIA] Folks’ verbalizations of animal clatter shifts depending on their locale. Can you connect a critter’s language of origin to its onomatopoeia? 1. French pig 3. Swedish mouse 2. Russian horse 4. Romanian dog 5. Spanish rooster A. ham-ham C. ki-ki-ri-ki B. groin-groin D. i-go-go E. pip-pip [SCI-FI SFX] Sound designers…

Noise-selecting earbuds SANDRA GUTIERREZ IN THE OFFICE HEADPHONES THAT ALLOW BIKERS OR PEDESTRIANS to hear selectively—say, only their music and useful traffic sounds—are a commuter’s dream. The now-discontinued Here One earbuds, released in 2017 by Doppler Labs, tried to do just that. Jacob Meacham, a former VP at the company, says the primary challenge is building a system that works quick enough; the earbuds would need to recognize an incoming sound and filter it out within a millisecond, or before your brain could register it. Otherwise, you’d hear the change from noise to silence, which would make you more aware of what you’re trying to remove. Other companies might succeed, but our ability to detect change will still be a challenge. Portable bathroom privacy EVERYONE IN THE POPSCI OFFICE It…

WHAT SOUNDS LIKE SILENCE often contains messages not meant for human ears. Some critters make noises too high-or low-pitched for our bodies to process. On the other end of the wildlife spectrum, calls can be so intense that they cause us pain and irreversible hearing loss. But much of nature’s symphony is simply unexpected. Tiny creatures are some of the loudest; seemingly mute animals aren’t really quiet at all; and even the ocean is filled with song. This scatter plot shows the volume and frequency of some of the wildest, noisiest, and most intense voices that color our world’s acoustic landscape.…

IN ITS NATIVE PUERTO RICO, THE COQUÍ frog’s eponymous croak is the stuff of lullabies. According to myths of the island’s indigenous Taíno people, the tiny amphibians memorialize a goddess’s lost lover by singing his name over and over: ko-kee, ko-kee. But in places without nostalgia for the nocturnal critter—or predators to keep it in check—the call is a nightmare, registering up to 90 decibels from 3 feet away. That’s like a mower running outside your window all night. Coquí have infiltrated the Dominican Republic, Virgin Islands, Florida, and California, but are most worrisome in Hawaii, where their cacophonous spread shows no signs of slowing. When the species arrived on Hawaii’s Big Island in the ’80s—likely a stowaway on imported plants—locals raged over lost sleep. But the chorus kept growing.…

LOUD MUSIC BLOWING OUT EARDRUMS isn’t the only way sound can get under your skin. The World Health Organization, for example, estimates that Western Europeans lose 1 million healthy years to traffic noise annually, mostly due to sleep disturbance and stress raising the risk of chronic issues like cancer and heart disease. Here’s what it takes for a noise to hit you where it hurts. 15minutes Time per day necessary for a pair of maxed-out headphones—reaching 100 dB or higher—to cause some degree of permanent hearing loss. 20Hz These low, inaudible frequencies, called infrasound, seem to make humans uneasy. It’s possible that evolution taught us to fear anything massive enough to make such deep drones, or perhaps it’s that the long wavelengths create uncomfortable pressure inside our bodies. 177dB The…

LISTENING TO RECORDS WAS A REVERENT ACT IN PETE Hutchison’s childhood home. Whenever his parents played their beloved Ravel and Debussy works, they enforced one rule: “You weren’t allowed to talk,” he says. Though Hutchison favored rock and jazz when he started his own collection as a teen in the 1970s, he returned to classical upon inheriting his father’s LPs. His interest in the genre eventually grew so deep that he spent $12,000 on a pristine copy of Mozart a Paris, a rare seven-disc set released in France in 1956. ¶ Hutchison now makes what many music aficionados consider the finest records on Earth. “IT’S A MINEFIELD OF EXPERIMENTATION. AND IT’S A BIG PART OF WHAT WE DO.”—PETE HUTCHISON He meticulously crafts reissues of jazz and classical titles (including his…

MOST SHOWS AND MOVIES STREAM WITH 360-degree audio that your wimpy TV speakers can’t handle. To fully experience every tire screech, you could crack open your walls and install an arsenal of equipment that will bombard your ears from every direction. Or you could opt for one of these simpler surround setups that wraps you in the sonic cocoon virtually—no remodeling necessary. Sound bar To produce the rumbles of that big brontosaurus, Sennheiser’s Ambeo uses six 4-inch woofers and a pair of 3.5-inch mids to bounce deep tones off the walls and ceiling, nixing the need for a dedicated subwoofer. Five tweeters hit the high notes. Headphones Immersive audio becomes disorienting if it doesn’t match what you see onscreen. Dolby’s Dimension headphones use accelerometers to detect when you’re off-axis with…

SLEEPING BY YOUR SMARTPHONE PROBABLY ISN’T HELPING YOU get solid shut-eye—notifications can be so tempting. Consider charging your device far from your pillow and placing this simple analog alarm clock at your bedside instead. The Braun BC12 owes its elegant look to the legacy of German designers Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs, and it does two things well: tell the time and wake you up. When it’s get-up o’clock, the 3-inch timepiece emits a gentle series of beeps that gradually increases in volume and frequency, until you either hit snooze or turn it off for good.…

FOR 24 HOURS EACH MARCH, a hush falls over the Indonesian island of Bali in observation of Nyepi, a compulsory day of silent reflection that marks the Hindu new year. Businesses close, streets clear, and beaches empty. Even air travel and shipping stop. In March 2017, oceanographers used this rare moment of tranquility to drop six hydrophones into the water and spend a few days trying to assess what the big blue sounds like without human interference. They clearly heard the snap of shrimp claws and the grunts and groans of fish crescendo into a nightly chorus. People imagine the ocean as serene, but the deep has never been the silent world that conservationist Jacques Cousteau once called it. Data suggests most of the 34,200 species of fish can hear,…

IN MARVEL’S DAREDEVIL, LAWYER by-day Matt Murdock fights crime by night with the help of enhanced senses he developed after an accident blinded him as a child. Aside from fanciful comic-book pages, however, being deprived of sight—whether permanently or temporarily with a blindfold—wouldn’t supercharge your hearing. “People imagine blind people have a sixth sense or something like that,” says Patrice Voss, a research associate at McGill University. But it’s not true that they can discern sounds or frequencies others can’t. Nonsighted people do, however, have a certain kind of heightened auditory perception, but that’s because they’re better listeners, Voss explains. The absence of sight can’t bolster the mechanics of physiological hearing, but the act of listening is a buildable skill. While sighted folks piece together their surroundings with an amalgam…

MAKING NOISE IS EASY, but saving it is hard. Humanity’s first big innovation in file sharing came along around 3,400 years ago, when ancient Mesopotamians experimented with a written notation for melodies they’d previously only shared out loud. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that engineers began to capture the sound waves themselves. The quality of early devices was low—poor materials and grimy recording environments could make music turn ghostly. But technicians continued to refine their tools; now anyone with a smartphone can save high-quality audio. Next time you blast your personalized playlist, remember to thank these musty old machines. Phonautograph In 1853, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phon autograph and made the likely first copy of a human voice seven years later. The device’s stylus preserved sound waves…

THE BIGGEST CLAMORS most of us will experience are things like jackhammers and jet engines, but the most ear-shattering noises in existence would do far worse than make you wince. Events on the scale of volcanic eruptions and exploding meteorites register at more than 194 decibels, a level that generates enough force to potentially pierce your eardrums and pop your lungs. At those highs, sound waves are so powerful, they no longer slip through the air but rather shove molecules out of their way. Decibels can’t even accurately measure these bangs; researchers instead quantify them by the amount of energy they release—like they do for bombs or other explosives. Here are some of the most deafening things on Earth, both natural and mechanical, including the absolute biggest kabooms ever recorded.…

IT MIGHT LOOK LIKE THE GUTS OF AN OLD CALCULATOR, but Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operator is actually a powerful music-production center. Record up to 40 seconds of anything with its built-in microphone, then press the little gizmo’s buttons to produce prerecorded synth notes, drum strokes, and other sounds. Adjust the tempo, tweak the pitch, and add effects. It won’t break the bank either: This gadget runs just $89 in a market where gear can cost 10 times as much.…

TUCKED Tucked inside the air traffic control tower in Portland, Maine, Samantha Bassett was busy making sure planes didn’t crash into each other. All systems seemed normal that day in May 2014. Aircraft pinged their positions on radar while a constant and chaotic barrage of updates and requests flowed through her headset. Then, out of nowhere, a burst of interference screamed into Bassett’s right ear. Those in the business call this phenomenon “getting sidetoned.” It can happen when lightning strikes, equipment malfunctions, or radio signals cause feedback like you might hear at a rock concert. Bassett simply took off the headset, switched on speaker mode, and kept working. The planes must go on, after all. Within the hour, though, Bassett got a headache and grew nauseous. She ended up going…

I helped develop Bose’s noise-cancellation technology, which works by creating sound with the opposite waveform of what you’re trying to block. That means we have to catalog all sorts of clatter—from the ordinary to the very odd—in this world. Whenever I am out and hear a weird noise, I record it. I have a couple of gigabites of these on my phone. In our lab, my team has a container lined with amplifiers and speakers—called the phunp box—that we use to play the tones, like the rumbles of trains and buses. This helps us make sure the products we design cancel the clamor. But unexpected events happen. Once, a customer told us that he was wearing the Quiet Comfort 20s—our first in-ear noise-canceling headphones, which debuted in 2013—on a train…

For decades, neuroscientists thought nonhuman primates couldn’t speak because their hyoid bone—found near the larynx—is situated differently than ours. But that notion is based on monkey-cadaver research from the 1960s, when tools to see live voice boxes didn’t exist. Recently, we used X-rays to record one of our lab’s macaques, Emiliano, as he ate, yawned, verbalized, and smacked his lips. With those videos, we traced his vocal anatomy frame by frame, and made a catalog of every contortion it could make. Further analysis showed he is fully capable of producing five distinct vowel noises. Once we knew monkeys could articulate, we wanted to know how they would come across. We used a program that produces audio based on vocal structure. My colleague’s wife chose the common phrase: “Will you marry…