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A new study shows that music teachers are routinely exposed to noise levels that could result in hearing loss. Researcher Hans Kunov says, “The hair cells of the inner ear simply crumble under the load, and they don’t grow back again.”

According to Canadian law, noise levels on the job should not exceed 90 decibels, which is the equivalent of a power lawn mower being run over eight hours in a 24-hour period.

Researcher Willy Wong measured the noise exposure of 18 music teachers at 15 high schools in Toronto and found that the peak noise level exceeded 85 decibels for 78% of them. During an average eight-hour day, 39% of them experienced harmful noise levels.
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Those of us who’ve had to deal with cranky toddlers and stubborn teenagers will not be surprised to learn that the brain’s center of reasoning and problem solving is the last to mature. This may be why it’s so much harder for people to quit smoking if they began when they were teenagers.

Scientists have done regular MRI scans of 13 people’s brains every two years, from the ages of 4 to 21 and learned that “higher-order” brain centers, such as the prefrontal cortex, don’t fully develop until young adulthood. The sequence of maturation follows the evolution of the mammalian brain, meaning that in humans, each of our brains has to evolve all over again.
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In the movie Fahrenheit 451, books have been burned, so a group of people volunteer to each memorize a book in order to keep it alive. Now author Shelley Jackson is using volunteers to create a story called “Skin.” Each of them will have one word of the story tattooed on their body. The story will not be published anywhere else, making it necessary to get most of the volunteers together (and arrange them in the correct order) to be able to read it.
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We know that Venice and New Orleans are sinking?but Chicago? It turns out that melting Canadian glaciers are causing the land around Chicago to sink.The ground underneath the city is sinking at less than an inch a year, but this could eventually be enough to cause flooding.

Researchers at Northwestern University used 10 years of readings from global positioning satellites at more than 200 points across North America to measure how the ground is shifting. “All of Canada’s going up,” says geologist Seth Stein. “The U.S. is going down.”
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