are headphones harmful for the ear?

Chances are you have a smartphone in your pocket, and a pair of headphones that connect it directly to your ears. Unfortunately, those same devices that make listening to music or talking on the phone so simple might also be damaging your ears.

According to a 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the use of headphones and earbuds has led to a major increase in the prevalence of hearing loss in adolescents and young adults. It’s reasonable to assume the same is true for adults using the same devices as well. So what can you do to keep yourself safe from hearing loss caused by headphones or other audio devices?

HOW LOUD NOISE CAN DAMAGE HEARING

When sound waves reach our ears, they cause the eardrum to vibrate. This vibration is transmitted to the inner ear through several small bones, where it reaches the cochlea. The cochlea is a fluid-filled chamber in your ear that contains many thousands of small “hairs.” When sound vibrations reach the cochlea, the fluid inside it vibrates and causes the hairs to move. Louder sounds cause stronger vibrations, which cause the hairs to move more.

When you listen to sounds that are too loud for too long, these hair cells lose their sensitivity to vibration. Many loud noises cause the cells to bend or fold over. This is what causes the sensation of “temporary hearing loss” after you are exposed to loud noises. The hair cells take time to recover from extreme vibrations caused by loud noise.

In some cases, however, the cells never recover. They may be too damaged to function normally any longer. This leads to lasting hearing loss. This type of noise-induced hearing damage is almost impossible to recover from. No cure exists for repairing a damaged inner ear.

HOW TO AVOID HEARING DAMAGE FROM HEADPHONES--

TURN DOWN THE VOLUME

The single biggest change you can make to protect your hearing is to turn down the volume on your devices. Noise-induced hearing loss is caused primarily by exposure to very loud noise. Limiting your exposure can protect your ears.

USE NOISE-CANCELING HEADPHONES

Most people listen to headphones at a high volume to “drown out” other sounds. One good way to lower the volume on your devices and protect your ears is to use noise-canceling headphones. These headphones block out external sound, letting you enjoy your music or videos at a lower volume without distraction.

USE OVER-THE-EAR MODELS

As we mentioned above, audiologists and otologists frequently recommend using over-the-ear headphones instead of in-ear or earbud-style models. Over-the-ear headphones increase the distance between your eardrums and the speakers, lowering the chance for hearing loss.

LIMIT YOUR EXPOSURE

Along with turning down the volume, you can also protect your ears by reducing your listening time. One good rule of thumb is the “60-60 rule”: Don’t listen at any louder than 60% of max volume for any longer than 60 minutes at a time.

Unfortunately your ears may never heal completely if they are already damaged from headphone-related noise. That doesn’t mean you’ll never hear well again, though. A hearing aid from a licensed audiologist can restore hearing ability and make it easy for you to hear again.

why dogs have strong sense of smell?

why dogs have strong sense of smell?

Dogs’ sense of smell is essentially what sense of sight is to humans. Dogs interpret the world through their nose, as compared to humans, who are dependent on their sight to see the world.

Comparing Dog Nose and Human Nose

When we try to smell something, we inhale air with our nose and we use the same passage in our nose to exhale that air. Therefore, all the smell that we get when we are inhaling is lost when we exhale that air. However, a dog has two different air passages, one for breathing and another for smelling. This means that dogs are able to store the smell in their nose even while breathing out the air!

When dogs exhale, they send air out through the slits of their nose, but the manner in which this air is exhaled through their nose helps the dogs to draw in new odor molecules. This also helps dogs capture more smells when sniffing.

You must have noticed that dogs’ noses are always wet, but have you ever wondered why? The mucus on the dog’s nose helps it smell by capturing scent particles. A dog also has the ability to smell independently from each nostril, this helps the dog to understand from which direction the smell is coming.

The passage through which dogs smell the air contains highly specialized olfactory receptor cells, which are responsible for receiving smells. A dog contains about 225-300 million smell receptors, as compared to just 5 million of these receptors being present in a human nose.

Comparing Dog Brain and Human Brain

By now, we clearly know that dogs have a nose that can smell about 1,000-10,000 times better than a human, but how are dogs able to remember all the different smells that they have sensed throughout their life?

The answer lies in the difference between the brains of dogs and humans. A human brain has a larger visual cortex than dogs, whereas a dog’s brain has a much larger olfactory cortex than humans. The visual cortex is responsible for processing visual information, whereas the olfactory cortex is responsible for processing the sense of smell. A dog’s olfactory cortex is about 40 times larger than that of a human.

Dog’s sense of smell

Dogs contain another special olfactory system above the roof of its mouth called the vomeronasal organ, which helps dogs sense things that they cannot see, such as human emotions. A dog can tell if a person is sad or happy, and this also helps dogs know whether an animal is friendly or dangerous to them. This unique ability also helps them identify potential mates.

The power of the canine sense of smell is unique and has helped humans in a number of ways. A dog can feel if a person is sick or sad, and can even identify if someone is pregnant. With proper training, some dogs can even be trained to detect bombs. They can sense the emotions of humans and react appropriately in a time of need, and they also have been able to help in the early detection of cancer in humans, essentially saving the lives of their owners.

All states of matter explained

The four fundamental states

Solid

Solid-state materials are commonly grouped into three classes: insulators, semiconductors, and conductors. (At low temperatures some conductors, semiconductors, and insulators may become superconductors.)

Liquid

 A liquid is one of the states of matter. The particles in a liquid are free to flow, so while a liquid has a definite volume, it does not have a definite shape. Liquids consist of atoms or molecules that are connected by intermolecular bonds.

Gas

Gas is a state of matter that has no fixed shape and no fixed volume. ... When more gas particles enter a container, there is less space for the particles to spread out, and they become compressed. The particles exert more force on the interior volume of the container. This force is called pressure.

Plasma

Plasma is a state of matter that is often thought of as a subset of gases, but the two states behave very differently. ... But unlike ordinary gases, plasmas are made up of atoms in which some or all of the electrons have been stripped away and positively charged nuclei, called ions, roam freely.

Non-classical states

Glass

Nowadays, "glassy solid" or "amorphous solid" is considered to be the overarching concept, and glass the more special case: Glass is an amorphous solid that exhibits a glass transition. Polymers are often amorphous. Other types of amorphous solids include gels, thin films, and nanostructured materials such as glass.

Liquid crystal states

A liquid crystal is a state of matter between liquid and solid (a "mesophase"). ... Liquid crystals are composed of organic, rod-shaped molecules that align in parallel, and the common types used in electronic displays are nematic, cholesteric and smectic.

Microphase-separated

Microphase separation is the term used to describe the type of chain segregation which is able to occur in block and graft copolymers in the bulk state and in concentrated solution, and the structures generated by the packing of domains on the macrolattice are termed mesomorphic structures.]

Low-temperature states

Superfluid

A superfluid is an exotic state of matter with unusual properties. It has zero viscosity, which means it can flow across a surface and not slow down — or lose any energy — due to friction with the surface. Superfluids, such as liquid helium, must be cooled to extremely low temperatures for such properties to emerge.

Bose–Einstein condensate

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a group of atoms cooled to within a hair of absolute zero. When they reach that temperature the atoms are hardly moving relative to each other; they have almost no free energy to do so. ... Instead, the atoms fall into the same quantum states, and can't be distinguished from one another.

Fermionic condensate

A fermionic condensate, or fermi condensate, is a state of matter (superfluid phase) which is very similar to the Bose–Einstein condensate. ... The only difference is that Bose-Einstein condensates are made up of bosons, and are social with each other (in groups, or clumps).

Rydberg molecule

This latest discovery reveals a new state of quantum matter called a “Rydberg polaron,” a relatively giant particle containing many atoms that behaves in some ways like a single massive particle. ... These highly excited atoms were immersed in a gas that had been cooled to just a millionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Quantum Hall state

Nearly a century later, researchers earned a Nobel Prize for the uncovering special resistance-free conducting states, quantum in origin, that occur when at very specific magnetic fields. Known as the quantum Hall effect, these states, observed in two-dimensional structures, corresponded to new states of matter.

Photonic matter

Photonic matter is a phenomenon where photons interacting with a gas develop apparent mass, and can interact with each other, even forming photonic "molecules". ... This is in contrast to photons moving in empty space, which have no rest mass, and cannot interact.

Dropleton

Part particle, part liquid, a newly discovered "quasiparticle" has been dubbed a quantum droplet, or a dropleton. The dropleton is a collection of electrons and "holes" (places where electrons are missing) inside a semiconductor, and it has handy properties for studying quantum mechanics.

High-energy states

Degenerate matter

Degenerate matter is a highly dense state of fermionic matter in which particles must occupy high states of kinetic energy to satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle. The description applies to matter composed of electrons, protons, neutrons or other fermions.

Quark matter

An extremely dense phase of matter made up of subatomic particles called quarks – may exist at the heart of neutron stars. It can also be created for brief moments in particle colliders on Earth, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. But the collective behaviour of quark matter isn't easy to pin down.

Color-glass condensate

"At some point, the splitting of gluons inside the proton reaches a limit at which the multiplication of gluons ceases to increase. Such a state is known as the color glass condensate, a hypothesized phase of matter that is thought to exist in very high-energy protons and as well as in heavy nuclei."

Other states

Supersolid

A supersolid is a special quantum state of matter where particles form a rigid, spatially ordered structure, but also flow with zero viscosity.

String-net liquid

In condensed matter physics, a string-net is an extended object whose collective behavior has been proposed as a physical mechanism for topological order by Michael A. Levin and Xiao-Gang Wen. A particular string-net model may involve only closed loops; or networks of oriented, labeled strings obeying branching rules given by some gauge group; or still more general networks.

Superglass

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Featured snippet from the web

A superglass is a phase of matter which is characterized (at the same time) by superfluidity and a frozen amorphous structure. J.C. Séamus Davis theorised that frozen helium-4 (at 0.2 K and 50 Atm) may be a superglass

Can Vitamin-C resist us from COVID-19?

An important note

No supplement will cure or prevent disease totally.

With the 2019 corona virus COVID-19 pandemic, it’s especially important to understand that no supplement, diet, or other lifestyle modification other than physical distancing, also known as social distancing, and proper hygiene practices can protect you from COVID-19.

You may have noticed the vitamin C section of the supplement aisle looking bare these days or seen the claims on social media that vitamin C can help with COVID-19.

While physicians and researchers are studying the effects of high dose intravenous (IV) vitamin C on the new coronavirus, no supplement, including vitamin C, can prevent or treat COVID-19.

This article reviews what vitamin C is, how it affects immunity, how it’s being tried for COVID-19 treatment in a hospital setting, and whether taking an oral supplement is beneficial.

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What is vitamin C?

Vitamin C is an essential nutrient with several roles in your body. It’s a potent antioxidant, meaning it can neutralize unstable compounds in your body called free radicals and help prevent or reverse cellular damage caused by these compounds .Trusted Source

It’s also involved in a number of biochemical processes, many of which are related to immune health.Trusted Source

The Daily Value (DV) for vitamin C is 90 mg per day, but breastfeeding women need an extra 30 mg and people who smoke need an extra 35 mg per day.

It’s pretty easy to meet your vitamin C needs through your diet as long as you eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. For example, a single medium orange provides 77% of the DV, and 1 cup (160 grams) of cooked broccoli provides 112% of the DV.

Trusted Source

How does it affect immunity?

Vitamin C affects your immune health in several ways. Its antioxidant activity can decrease inflammation, which may help improve your immune function.

Vitamin C also keeps your skin healthy by boosting collagen production, helping the skin serve as a functional barrier to keep harmful compounds from entering your body. Vitamin C in the skin can also promote wound healing.

The vitamin also boosts the activity of phagocytes, immune cells that can “swallow” harmful bacteria and other particles.

In addition, it promotes the growth and spread of lymphocytes, a type of immune cell that increases your circulating antibodies, proteins that can attack foreign or harmful substances in your blood.

In studies of its effectiveness against viruses that cause the common cold, vitamin C doesn’t appear to make you any less likely to get a cold — but it may help you get over a cold faster and make the symptoms less severe.Trusted Sourc).

There’s also some evidence from animal research and case studies in humans that high dose or IV vitamin C can reduce lung inflammation in severe respiratory illnesses caused by H1N1 (“swine flu”) or other viruses.

However, these doses were far above the DV, and there’s not enough research to support the use of high dose vitamin C for lung inflammation at this time. You shouldn’t take high doses of vitamin C supplements — even orally — because they can cause side effects like diarrhea.

Vitamin C and COVID-19

In an article published in the Chinese Journal of Infection Diseases, the Shanghai Medical Association endorsed the use of high dose vitamin C as a treatment for hospitalized people with COVID-19.

Doses that are magnitudes higher than the DV are recommended to be given through IV to improve lung function, which may help keep a patient off of mechanical ventilation or life support.

Additionally, a 2019 review found that both oral and IV high dose vitamin C treatment may aid people admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) for critical illnesses by reducing ICU stay length by 8% and shortening the duration of mechanical ventilation by 18.2%.

Chinese researchers have also registered a clinical trial to further study the effectiveness of IV vitamin C in hospitalized people with COVID-19.

However, it’s important to note that vitamin C is not yet a standard part of the treatment plan for COVID-19 because evidence is still lacking.

Though high dose IV vitamin C is currently being tested to see if it can improve lung function in people with COVID-19, no evidence suggests that high doses of oral vitamin C supplements can help with the disease. In fact, they can cause complications like diarrhea.

Vitamin-C based foods:-

	Food	Serving size	Milligrams (mg) per serving	Percent of 90 mg daily value (DV)
1	Guava, raw	1 cup, raw	377	419%
2	Sweet red pepper, raw	1 cup, raw	190	211%
3	Tomato juice	1 cup, canned	170	188.9%
4	Orange juice	1 cup	124	137.8%
5	Sweet green pepper	1 cup, raw	120	133%
6	Hot green chili pepper, raw	1 pepper, raw	109	121%
7	Oranges	1 large fruit	97.5	108.8%
8	Strawberries	1 cup, sliced	97.6	108%
9	Papaya	1 small fruit	95.6	106.2%
10	Pink grapefruit juice	1 cup	93.9	104.3%
11	Broccoli	1 cup, raw	81.2	90.2%
12	Pineapple chunks	1 cup, raw	78.9	87.7%
13	Potato	1 large vegetable	72.7	80.8%
14	Brussels sprouts	1 cup, raw	74.8	79.8%
15	Kiwifruit	1 fruit	64	71.1%
16	Mango	1 cup, raw	60.1	66.7%
17	Cantaloupe	1 cup	57.3	63.7%
18	Cauliflower	1 cup, raw	51.6	57.3%
19	Lemon	1 fruit	44.5	49.4%
20	White grapefruit	½ medium fruit	39	43.3%