The sound of silence

If you live in a big city like London, you have to get reasonably good at ignoring sound. I usually don't realise how loud my city is at night until I go somewhere that's extremely quiet, and I only notice when I can't sleep because it's too quiet. To truly keep out the sounds of the night in a city, you need to double or even triple glaze your window, which is fine really, it's not so expensive and it doesn't look that bad. But if the team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF in Darmstadt, Germany , could figure out a way to make their noise canceling window device commercially viable, they could have a huge city rat client base on their hands. The device is a piezoelectric patch which detects sound-generated vibration and then vibrates at a phase that cancels out the sound. Before I can get my silent night, though, the team need to make the patch transparent, minimize the cost of maintenance, and boost the effectiveness of the patch against intermittent noises - which could take a while. Good job I've just invested in some ear plugs.

ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: LOCOSTORM)