Nighttime aircraft noise can affect your blood pressure instantly and increase the risk of hypertension.

People who live near major airports may be disturbed by the din of aircraft flying overhead all day, but a new study finds it can also boost their blood pressure even while they’re sleeping.
In fact, the louder the noise, the higher blood pressure will go, the study found. That finding holds whether the noise comes from airplanes, passing traffic or other sources, according to the report in the February issue of the European Heart Journal, HealthDay said.
“We know that noise from air traffic can be a source of irritation, but our research shows that it can also be damaging for people’s health, which is particularly significant in light of plans to expand international airports,“ co-author Dr. Lars Jarup, from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial College London, said in a prepared statement.
“Nighttime aircraft noise can affect your blood pressure instantly and increase the risk of hypertension. It is clear to me that measures need to be taken to reduce noise levels from aircraft, in particular during nighttime, in order to protect the health of people living near airports,“ Jarup said.
In the study, the British team studied 140 people who lived near London’s Heathrow Airport, as well as airports in Athens, Milan and Stockholm.
While the volunteers slept, the researchers remotely measured their blood pressure every 15 minutes. They also analyzed the noise level in the participant’s bedrooms.
Jarup’s group found a noticeable increase in blood pressure when noise levels grew louder than 35 decibels. That amount of increased noise can occur as an airplane flies overhead, from traffic noise, or even from someone snoring nearby. The increase in blood pressure was apparent even when the participant stayed asleep, the researchers found.
The noise from aircraft increased blood systolic pressure (the top number in a reading) an average of 6.2 mmHg, and diastolic pressure an average of 7.4 mmHg, the researchers found. This increase in blood pressure was also seen from other noise, such as road traffic, according to the report.
The boost in blood pressure was directly related to the loudness of the noise, Jarup’s group found. In fact, every 5 decibel increase in airplane noise caused an increase in systolic blood pressure of 0.66 mmHg. The key factor in increasing blood pressure was the level of the noise, not its source, the researchers noted.

The giant planet HD 189733b is too hot for its methane and water vapor to signal life.

Organic molecules--in the form of methane--have been detected on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The giant planet lies too close to its parent star for the methane to signal life, but the detection offers hope that astronomers will one day be able to analyze the atmospheres of Earth-like worlds.
Astronomers Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht of Caltech in Pasadena, US, and Giovanna Tinetti of University College London, UK, used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the giant planet HD 189733b, which is slightly more massive than Jupiter and lies 63 light years from Earth, according to NewScientist.com.
Because the planet crosses the face of its parent star as seen from Earth, some starlight is periodically filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, where different chemicals absorb particular wavelengths.
The observations confirm an earlier tentative detection of water vapor and reveal the presence of methane gas.
“Initially, that is surprising,“ says Sara Seager of MIT in Cambridge, US, who was not involved in the study. Because HD 189733b orbits very close to its parent star--just 10 percent of Mercury’s distance from the Sun, it is very hot, with atmospheric temperatures of about 700¡ Celsius. “When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane,“ says Seager.
The authors suggest that some ill-understood chemical process might be responsible, either concentrating the methane in cooler parts of the atmosphere, or generating extra methane directly. Alternatively, the methane might simply mean that the planet happens to be very rich in carbon, Seager says.
This combination of water and organic molecules would be a promising one for life if it were found in a less hostile spot than the atmosphere of a searing gas giant.
Eventually, astronomers hope to be able to analyze the atmospheres of smaller planets more akin to the Earth, and the new study is a big step in that direction, says Seager. “The path that we’re on is towards rocky planets,“ she told New Scientist. “I’m really excited about this.“

Traffic lights that wirelessly keep track of vehicles could speed up journeys, reduce fuel consumption and improve urban air quality. So say Romanian and US researchers who show that ’smart traffic lights might reduce the time drivers spend waiting at intersections by more than 28 percent during rush hours.
The researchers recorded peak traffic flow at a major junction in Bucharest, Romania, and then used the distributed computing lab at Rutgers University, New Jersey, US, to model traffic flow, NewScientist.com reported.
In the simulations, traffic lights were fed the position and speed of all vehicles on nearby roads and programmed to calculate how to phase color changes in order to optimize traffic flow. As well as reducing intersection waiting times, the team calculates that CO2 emissions could fall by 6.5 percent.
Liviu Iftode from Rutgers University and colleagues point out that journey times, fuel consumption and emissions could all be improved further if traffic lights were to transmit information back to vehicles.
If a set of lights told drivers when they were about to change, “drivers [could] adapt their speed accordingly to avoid useless accelerations or react faster on green,“ the team writes in a paper presented at the Vehicular Technology Conference held in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2007.
“Moreover, in-vehicle software could recommend appropriate speeds based on when the current phase will end, and how many cars are already queued,“ they write.
For this to work, vehicles must transmit data to the computer system that controls a city’s lights. This is not currently possible, but companies and research groups worldwide are already developing vehicle communications systems that might be adapted for this purpose.
Dash Express is one such car-to-car communication system expected to ship commercially in the US in February 2008. It provides drivers with real-time traffic information using data automatically gathered from other vehicles with Dash Express units, including their current speed and location, via a centralized computer.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, are testing another vehicle-to-vehicle platform called CarTel that uses Wi-Fi hotspots to send and receive information during a journey.
Another vehicle communication network called CarTorrent developed by a team at University of California in Los Angeles, US, lets drivers within 300 meters of each other exchange data from a range of vehicle sensors.
A European consortium of industrial and academic groups, called Com2React, has even demonstrated a “peer-to-peer“ wireless car network that works without any centralized control system.

An implantable device that releases precise doses of a drug into a patient’s bloodstream at the flick of a switch is a step closer with prototype technology demonstrated by US scientists.
Paula Hammond and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, developed a drug-infused film that breaks down when a voltage is applied across its surface, NewScientist.com wrote.
The technology promises greater control at lower cost than alternative approaches to precision drug delivery, the researchers say.
The new film could be used to coat an implantable powered device that would release medication on command. Applying a small voltage from the device to the film causes it to break down and release its drug. Turning the voltage off again stops the film dissolving.
The researchers used nanoparticles of a pigment called Prussian blue--an inorganic iron hexacyanoferrate compound--to make the film and a chemical called dextran sulphate to represent the drug in their prototype.
They took a glass substrate coated with indium tin oxide and dipped it in a solution containing dextran sulfate, which is positively charged. Next, they dipped the substrate into a solution containing negatively charged Prussian blue nanoparticles.
By repeating the process they gradually built up alternating layers of pigment layers and “drug“ held together by electrostatic charge.
Applying 1.25 volts to the substrate caused the layers to lose their charge and begin dissolving in a solution. When the voltage was removed, the layers stabilized and stopped dissolving.
The device could be used to deliver drugs to a specific part of the body, such an area where a tumor had been removed. Or it could deliver a drug needed only under certain conditions, such as anti-seizure medication, Hammond says.
Drug release could be controlled manually with a remote control or even by a device that monitors conditions in the body and turns itself off and on, she adds.
Other researchers have proposed micro-fluidic devices for drug release, but Hammond believes her approach is cheaper and simpler.
“We won’t have to use any sort of machining, or any of the more complex micro-fabricating techniques,“ she told New Scientist. “We can actually generate these thin films, and literally stamp them onto surfaces.“
“Switching on and off is the key, and something they have done well,“ says David LaVan, a mechanical engineer at Yale University. “The most significant challenge would be to scale this up to deliver enough drug to justify the use of an implanted device for drug delivery.“

Popular wireless technology known as Bluetooth could get a lot faster next year by taking advantage of Wi-Fi technology already built into many gadgets.
Linking Bluetooth and Wi-Fi may make it easier and faster to transfer large amounts of music between computers and cell phones, or send pictures from a camera phone to a printer, or video from a camcorder to a TV, according to Physorg.com.
Michael Foley, director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, said the first devices with the technology could be on the market in the middle of next year.
The industry group behind Bluetooth, which has more than 10,000 member companies, plans to announce Monday that it is pursuing the technology and will make it available next year.
A fast transfer channel for Bluetooth using a different radio technology, ultra-wideband, was announced in 2006, but delays in getting it to work prompted the Bluetooth group to look at Wi-Fi too, Foley said.
Some products, like laptops, already combine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functions, but they work off separate chips. Most likely, manufacturers will use single chips still under development that combine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities.
“It does appear that the first products ... are going to be Bluetooth-Wi-Fi, and our members want to take advantage of that,“ Foley said, adding that all the major makers of Bluetooth chips are participating in the project.
The combination devices will use the regular low-power Bluetooth radios to recognize each other and establish connections. If they need to transfer a large file, they will be able to turn on their Wi-Fi radios, then turn them off to save power after finishing the transfer, Foley said.
The new technology doesn’t have a name, and it isn’t clear how consumers will be able to tell it apart from Bluetooth-UWB devices, which the industry group still supports.
“This in no way ... changes our vision of using ultra-wideband technology for high speed when that technology is ready,“ Foley said.
While it started out as a specific radio technology, Bluetooth is turning into an umbrella standard for a variety of different radio technologies.
Apart from the high-speed flavors, the SIG has incorporated an ultra-low-power wireless technology developed by Nokia Corp. and previously known as Wibree. Products like watches and pedometers that use that technology are also expected to hit the market next year.