Stop irritating chatter with speech-jammer!

If “shhhh” doesn’t work, the Speech Jammer might. This device renders chatterers speechless! Who knows, the Speech Jammer may one day find its way into classrooms and debates. This device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada won the 2012 Ig Nobel prize in acoustics.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

The Speech Jammer uses our own speaking to silence us. For the average person, speaking requires us to hear ourselves. If that feedback becomes distorted, the person slows down and then stops talking.

The Speech Jammer records a person’s voice and plays it back with a slight time delay (a few hundred milliseconds). This feedback of hearing your words again, slightly after you’ve said them, is so disruptive that it renders you speechless. Perhaps, with practice, one might be able to overcome the speech jammer and continue speaking, but to the best of our knowledge, it hasn’t been done yet. Kurihara and Tsukada have posted a YouTube video of their Speech Jammer in action, which you can see below.

The speech jammer is composed of a directional microphone, a time delay integrated circuit, and a directional speaker to play the sound back. All of the components are well known, but the novelty stems from how they are used together.

For further information about the physics behind the Speech Jammer, please visit Physics Central.

Red Grapes, Red Wine Could Prevent Hearing Loss and Cognitive Decline

Studies linking red wine with numerous health benefits are not new, though neither are studies coming to opposite conclusions, admittedly. But in the last decade or so, we’ve seen numerous bodies of research indicating a wealth of potential benefits in an occasional or even regular glass of red wine. Recently, scientists with the Department of Otolarynology-Head & Neck Surgery at Henry Ford Hospital have found the active component within red wine and grapes, known as resveratrol, may help protect against both hearing loss and cognitive decline.

“Our latest study focuses on resveratrol and its effect on bioinflammation, the body’s response to injury and something that is believed to be the cause of many health problems including Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, aging, and hearing loss,” said the study’s lead author Michael D. Seidman, director of the Division of Otologic/Neurotologic Surgery.

The researchers looked at how resveratrol could protect against hearing loss and cognitive decline thought to be caused by cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), a “key to the inflammatory process”. They found that noise exposure caused an up-regulation of COX-2 while resveratrol inhibited COX-2 expression and actually reduced hearing loss caused by prolonged acoustic stimulation in rats.

“COX-2 levels are induced dramatically following noise exposure,” the study reads. “This increased expression may be a potential mechanism of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) and a possibly mechanism of resveratrol’s ability to mitigate NIHL by its ability to reduce COX-2 expression.”

“We’ve shown that by giving animals resveratrol, we can reduce the amount of hearing and cognitive decline,” said Dr. Seidman. 

Resveratrol is found in most concentrated levels within the skin of red grapes, which is why it is found in red wine. While the benefits of red wine due to resveratrol are suspected to be many, critics warn against using red wine as a health food.

To that end, a study last fall by researchers with Rutgers University found that just two glasses of red wine each day can actually reduce brain cell production by up to 40%. They found that although motor skills and short-term associative learning were not affected by a blood alcohol level of .08 (the legal driving limit), brain cell production was.

What does this mean for you? It likely means that resveratrol has health benefits, but the alcohol in wine could negate those benefits if consumed in larger amounts. In other words, you can get your resveratrol from red grapes and even wine, but don’t continue to drink moderately if you’re concerned about the potential negative effects.

From Natural Society

Hearing protection - You're doing it wrong

Why you should wear ear protection