New research presented this week at APHA’s 2017 Annual Meeting and Expo examined the burden of air pollution and its association with mortality in Chinese cities. The study by researchers at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health showed a significant correlation between higher air quality index concentrations and higher mortality rates. The study is the first to provide strong evidence of the burden of air pollution in major Chinese cities, as well as the impacts of air quality and climate change on urban population mortality.
Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of "This is Your Brain on Music," says listening to music while you work is likely to make you less productive.
"You're having so much more fun," said Levitin, "that you feel more productive."
He cited a growing body of research suggesting that, in almost every case, your performance on intellectual tasks (think reading or writing) suffers considerably when you listen to music.
10. Nursery Worker or Teacher (85 dB)
A class of 30 children can be exceptionally noisy. Nursery workers and teachers suffer the effects of excessive noise — up to 85 dB — which, with continued and prolonged exposure, can cause damage to the eardrum.
A study by Simone Ritter at Radboud University in the Netherlands and Sam Ferguson, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, looked at how listening to various types of music affected different types of thinking compared to working in silence.
Their study found that happy music enhanced participants’ creative “divergent thinking.” However they found it had no impact on “convergent thinking,” which is problem-solving.
The most widespread and well-documented subjective response to noise is annoyance, which may include fear and mild anger, related to a belief that one is being avoidably harmed. Noise is also seen as intrusive into personal privacy, while its meaning for any individual is important in determining whether that person will be annoyed by it.
Evolution did not equip you to live in a world of constant noise. Your nervous system was engineered by natural selection for an environment of almost total quiet. Nature is mostly filled with soft, quiet sounds: leaves rustling, water trickling, insects buzzing. An animal call here and there. This is what your amygdala (the fear center in the brain) rates as a normal sound level. Sharp sounds, loud bangs, people yelling and crying, revving engines and the like all trigger a fear/danger response.
Unwanted and potentially unhealthy noise permeates everything we do -- our homes, offices, leisure time, even our sleep, says the National Academy of Engineering.
The worst noisemakers are machines -- all forms of transportation, including planes, trains, cars and trucks; lawnmowers, snow blowers, leaf blowers and other loud household products; and manufacturing machines.
According to studies, the noisiest cities are the largest ones (those with a population in excess of one million). The quietest among them is Phoenix, AZ at only 47.2 dBA. Chicago, IL is on the other side of the scale – the average noise level here is 54.8 dBA.
The Anchorage municipality is technically the quietest city with a population greater than 250,000; the average noise level here is 34.5 dB, which is more in line with the numbers encountered in small villages.
New workplace safety and health issues continue to emerge around the relatively new fields of nanotechnology, advanced materials, and additive manufacturing, which makes updated on information a challenge for safety professionals and others.
Because many people turn to Wikipedia for information, scientists with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) gathered with “Wikipedians” from across the Midwest to expand and improve Wikipedia articles about nanotechnology OSH.
Additional scientific research and a broad sharing of existing data are needed by safety and health practitioners across the country to better protect workers in every industry, according to the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE). That’s why ASSE brought together dozens of industry leaders and safety experts recently for a research workshop aimed at creating a new wave of progress.
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