Sound

BACKGROUND: Genomic and molecular alterations are increasingly important in cancer diagnosis, and scientific advances are opening new treatment avenues. Precision oncology (PO) uses a patient's genomic profile to determine optimal treatment, promising fewer side effects and higher success rates. Within PO, tumor-agnostic (TA) therapies target genomic alterations irrespective of tumor location. However, traditional value frameworks and approval pathways pose challenges which may limit patient access to PO therapies...

PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between speechreading ability, phonological skills, and word reading ability in typically developing children. METHOD: Sixty-six typically developing children (6-7 years old) completed tasks measuring word reading, speechreading (words, sentences, and short stories), alliteration awareness, rhyme awareness, nonword reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). RESULTS: Speechreading ability was significantly correlated with rhyme and alliteration awareness, phonological error rate, nonword reading, and reading ability (medium effect sizes) and RAN (small effect size)...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an optimal method for detecting and monitoring cetaceans as they frequently produce sound while underwater. Cue counting, counting acoustic cues of deep-diving cetaceans instead of animals, is an alternative method for density estimation, but requires an average cue production rate to convert cue density to animal density. Limited information about click rates exists for sperm whales in the central North Pacific Ocean. In the absence of acoustic tag data, we used towed hydrophone array data to calculate the first sperm whale click rates from this region and examined their variability based on click type, location, distance of whales from the array, and group size estimated by visual observers...

Binaural beat (BB) has been investigated as a potential modality to enhance sleep quality. In this study, we introduce a new form of BB, referred to as dynamic BB (DBB), which incorporates dynamically changing carrier frequency differences between the left and right ears. Specifically, the carrier frequency of the right ear varied between 100 and 103 Hz over a period, while the left ear remained fixed at 100 Hz, yielding a frequency difference range of 0 to 3 Hz. The objective of this study was to examine the effect of DBB on sleep quality...

Hearing aids and other hearing devices should provide the user with a benefit, for example, compensate for effects of a hearing loss or cancel undesired sounds. However, wearing hearing devices can also have negative effects on perception, previously demonstrated mostly for spatial hearing, sound quality and the perception of the own voice. When hearing devices are set to transparency, that is, provide no gain and resemble open-ear listening as well as possible, these side effects can be studied in isolation...

Mycotoxins, ubiquitous contaminants in food, present a global threat to human health and well-being. Mitigation efforts, such as the implementation of sound agricultural practices, thorough food processing, and the advancement of mycotoxin control technologies, have been instrumental in reducing mycotoxin exposure and associated toxicity. To comprehensively assess mycotoxins and their toxicodynamic implications, the deployment of effective and predictive strategies is imperative. Understanding the manner of action, transformation, and cumulative toxic effects of mycotoxins, moreover, their interactions with food matrices can be gleaned through gene expression and transcriptome analyses at cellular and molecular levels...

OBJECTIVES: Insomnia has been the subject of much systematic research because it is a risk factor for a variety of diseases. There is some evidence that gamma sensory stimulation therapy has also been demonstrated to improve sleep quality for people with Alzheimer's disease. However, it is unclear whether this method is effective for treating insomnia. The principal objective of this project was to investigate the efficacy and safety of gamma sensory flicker in improving the sleep quality of insomnia patients...

INTRODUCTION: Subjective tinnitus, the perception of sound without an external acoustic source, is often subsequent to noise-induced hearing loss or ototoxic medications. The condition is believed to result from neuroplastic alterations in the auditory centers, characterized by heightened spontaneous neural activities and increased synchrony due to an imbalance between excitation and inhibition. However, the role of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), a structure composed exclusively of GABAergic neurons involved in thalamocortical oscillations, in the pathogenesis of tinnitus remains largely unexplored...

Nowadays there are multiple ways to perceive music, from attending concerts (live) to listening to recorded music through headphones (medial). In between there are many mixed modes, such as playback performances. In empirical music research, this plurality of performance forms has so far found little recognition. Until now no measuring instrument has existed that could adequately capture the differences in perception and aesthetic judgment. The purpose of our empirical investigation was to capture all dimensions relevant to such an assessment...

BACKGROUND: Although structured clinical interviews are considered the gold standard for assessing binge eating disorder (BED), the self-administered Binge Eating Scale (BES) has been widely used as a screening tool for BED in clinical research. However, the psychometric properties of the BES among Chinese young adults remain unclear. This study aimed to examine the validity of a Chinese version of the BES with a large sample. METHODS: A total of 2182 young adult college students were tested using the Simplified Chinese version of BES (SCBES), the 7-Item Binge-Eating Disorder Screener (BEDS-7), the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), and the Dual-Modes of Self-Control Scale (DMSC)...

BACKGROUND: Auscultatory features of heart sounds (HS) in patients with heart failure (HF) have been studied intensively. Recent developments in digital and electrical devices for auscultation provided easy listening chances to recognize peculiar sounds related to diastolic HS such as S3 or S4 . This study aimed to quantitatively assess HS by acoustic measures of intensity (dB) and audio frequency (Hz). METHODS: Forty consecutive patients aged between 46 and 87 years (mean age, 74 years) with chronic cardiovascular disease (CVD) were enrolled in the present study after providing written informed consent during their visits to the Kitasato University Outpatient Clinic...

BACKGROUND: Tourette syndrome (TS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are two neurodevelopmental disorders with an onset before the age of 18 years. TS patients frequently reported atypical sensory phenomena (SP). Sensory processing abnormalities are also particularly frequent in ASD individuals. OBJECTIVES: Considering the higher rate of atypical sensory behaviours in both neurodevelopmental disorders, in the present study we analysed sensory experiences in patients with ASD and in patients with TS...

Objectives . This study aimed to investigate the effects of separate and concurrent exposure to occupational noise and hand-transmitted vibration (HTV) on auditory and cognitive attention. Methods . The experimental study was conducted with 40 construction workers who were exposed to noise (A-weighted equivalent sound pressure level of 90 dB) and to HTV (10 m/s2 at 31.5 Hz), and concurrent exposure to both for 30 min under simulated work with vibrating equipment used in construction. Cognitive performance aspects were then evaluated from each individual in two pre-exposure and post-exposure settings for each session...

BACKGROUND: Sweet taste administration before dental injections helps to control associated pain in children. AIM: To evaluate the efficacy of using a sugar-free flavor on pain perception during dental injections. DESIGN: Children (n = 84) aged 4-9 (mean 6.71 ± 1.55) years who required buccal infiltration bilaterally participated in this split-mouth randomized crossover study. On the test side (flavor visit), infiltration injections were applied after receiving a sugar-free flavor...

BACKGROUND: Euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) requests are common in countries where they are legal. Loneliness and social isolation are modifiable risk factors for mental illness and suicidal behaviour and are common in terminal illness. Our objective was to summarise available literature to clarify whether these and related measures of social connectedness might contribute to requests for EAS. METHODS: We conducted a pre-registered (PROSPERO CRD42019160508) systematic review and narrative synthesis of quantitative literature investigating associations between social connectedness and a) requested/actual EAS, b) attitudes towards EAS, and c) a desire for hastened death (DHD) by searching six databases (PsycINFO, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar) from inception to November 2022, rating eligible peer-reviewed, empirical studies using the QATSO quality assessment tool...

Inspired by recent findings in the visual domain, we investigated whether the stimulus-evoked pupil dilation reflects temporal statistical regularities in sequences of auditory stimuli. We conducted two preregistered pupillometry experiments (experiment 1, n = 30, 21 females; experiment 2, n = 31, 22 females). In both experiments, human participants listened to sequences of spoken vowels in two conditions. In the first condition, the stimuli were presented in a random order and, in the second condition, the same stimuli were presented in a sequence structured in pairs...

Because of their propensity to build micellar nanostructures, amphiphilic block copolymers (ABCs) are an appropriate and unique toughening agent for epoxy systems individually on their own and in grafted form. The presence of epoxiphilic and phobic ends in ABCs is responsible for the self-assembly and the micellar structure. Nanofiller-grafted ABCs can effectively enhance the toughness of epoxy via the synergistic interaction of nanofillers and the ABCs. Even though there is sound literature supporting the effect of ABCs in epoxy, the action of double hydrophilic block copolymers (DHBC) in the epoxy matrix is less handled...

We propose a phoxonic cavity with structural hierarchy to enhance acousto-optic interaction in acoustically dissipative media. In a conventional phoxonic cavity, interaction between infrared light and hypersound with the same wavelength scale became weak due to large acoustic attenuation whose coefficient is proportional to the square of the frequency. To alleviate the acoustic attenuation, it is necessary to use low-frequency sound with much longer wavelength than the infrared light, but the conventional phoxonic cavity is not suitable for confining such hypersound and infrared light simultaneously...

Obtaining accurate cardiac auscultation signals, including basic heart sounds (S1 and S2) and subtle signs of disease, is crucial for improving cardiac diagnoses and making the most of telehealth. This research paper introduces an innovative approach that utilizes a modified cosine transform (MCT) and a masking strategy based on long short-term memory (LSTM) to effectively distinguish heart sounds and murmurs from background noise and interfering sounds. The MCT is used to capture the repeated pattern of the heart sounds, while the LSTMs are trained to construct masking based on the repeated MCT spectrum...

Wood ashes can be used, e.g., as soil fertilizer or in construction materials; however, it is important to ensure that such use will not cause spreading of heavy metals and subsequent harm to the environment. Wood fly ashes (WFAs) generally have higher concentrations of heavy metals than wood bottom ashes. This paper focuses on the leaching of heavy metals from WFA, specifically identifying WFA characteristics that influence the leaching and changes in leaching caused by hydration and carbonation in ambient air...