News 2019

Music and mindful music listening may help people who have suffered strokes recover their impaired cognitive abilities more effectively, new research suggests. In a new paper published in the International Journal of Stroke, researchers and clinicians from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and East Anglia and NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde report on the outcomes of a study which aimed to investigate the effects of combining music listening and mindfulness techniques on recovery after a stroke.

5 April 2019 Music has long been known to affect people's mood. A certain tune can lift you up or bring you to tears, make you focus, relax or even run faster. Now a study is investigating how the power of music may improve human performance in one of the most stressful and alien environments we know - space.

Music consumption has unintended economic and environmental costs, according to new research published today (Monday 8 April 2019) in the run-up to worldwide Record Store Day. The price consumers have been willing to pay for listening to recorded music has never been lower, while the environmental impact of listening to music has never been higher, researchers have found.

Diet-induced changes in the human bite resulted in new sounds such as "f" in languages all over the world, a study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Zurich has shown. The findings contradict the theory that the range of human sounds has remained fixed throughout human history.

At relatively balmy temperatures, heat behaves like sound when moving through graphite, study reports. The next time you set a kettle to boil, consider this scenario: After turning the burner off, instead of staying hot and slowly warming the surrounding kitchen and stove, the kettle quickly cools to room temperature and its heat hurtles away in the form of a boiling-hot wave.

Railway noise is annoying. Trains cause numerous sleepless nights, especially in the vicinity of residential areas. This makes it all the more important to optimize trains and tracks in such a way as to dampen sounds. Empa researchers have devised a computer simulation that demonstrates how railway noise is created in the first place and which technical measures are effective in preventing it.

When scientists examine very small and swift objects they see the laws of physics working wildly differently than in the everyday "normal-sized" world. Observing these counterintuitive happenings in larger objects has always been difficult, but University of Queensland physicists - part of an Austrian/UK research team - have created a new technique to make the observation of quantum movement much easier.

A team of researchers based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh have recreated for the first time the famous Draupner freak wave measured in the North Sea in 1995. The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a freak wave in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform.