Neuroscience

Sensory hair cells regenerated, hearing restored in mammal ear

Hearing loss is a significant public health problem affecting close to 50 million people in the United States alone. Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common form and is caused by the loss of sensory hair cells in the ...

Arthritis & Rheumatism

What makes joints pop and crack and is it a sign of disease?

Joints emit a variety of noises, including popping, snapping, catching, clicking, grinding, grating and clunking. The technical term for these noises is "crepitus", from the Latin "to rattle". People of all ages can experience ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Ketamine found to increase brain noise

An international team of researchers including Sofya Kulikova, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE University-Perm, found that ketamine, being an NMDA receptor inhibitor, increases the brain's background noise, causing higher ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Cannabis increases the noise in your brain

Several studies have demonstrated that the primary active constituent of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (∆9-THC), induces transient psychosis-like effects in healthy subjects similar to those observed in schizophrenia. ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Breakthrough in search for tinnitus cure

After 20 years searching for a cure for tinnitus, researchers at the University of Auckland are excited by 'encouraging results' from a clinical trial of a mobile-phone-based therapy.

Other

Study shows background noise affects test scores

(Medical Xpress) -- A new study presented at the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America shows that students testing scores are negatively affected by background noise, but not the noise you would expect. The background ...

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Noise

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise ("static") heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if the signal is converted into sound (e.g., played through a loudspeaker); it manifests as "snow" on a television or video image. High noise levels can block, distort, change or interfere with the meaning of a message in human, animal and electronic communication.

In signal processing or computing it can be considered random unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. "Signal-to-noise ratio" is sometimes used to refer to the ratio of useful to irrelevant information in an exchange.

In biology, noise can describe the variability of a measurement around the mean, for example transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.

In many cases, the special case of thermal noise arises, which sets a fundamental lower limit to what can be measured or signaled and is related to basic physical processes described by thermodynamics, some of which are expressible by simple formulae.

In some fields, noise means unwanted information or data that is not relevant to the hypothesis or theory being investigated or tested.

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