Development of strategies to control urban air pollution is a complex and multi-disciplinary process involving a wide range of scientists with different expertise and interests. This paper presents an integrated assessment methodological scheme for the evaluation of air pollution control measures that are put forward in order to reduce sufficiently air pollution levels in urban areas. Forming l...

To update the current state of evidence and assess its quality, we conducted a systematic review on the effects of environmental noise exposure on the cardio-metabolic systems as input for the new WHO environmental noise guidelines for the European Region. We identified 600 references relating to studies on effects of noise from road, rail and air traffic, and wind turbines on the cardio-metabo...

Air pollution can affect health and well-being of people and ecosystems. Due to the health risk posed for sensitive population groups, it is important to provide with hourly and daily forecasts of air pollution. One way to assess air pollution is to make use of the Common Air Quality Index (CAQI) of the European Environment Agency (EEA). In this paper we employ a number of Computational Intelli...

We conducted a multi-country study to estimate the perceived economic values of traffic-related air pollution and noise health risks within the framework of a large European project. We used contingent valuation as a method to assess the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for both types of pollutants simultaneously. We asked respondents how much they would be willing to pay annually to avoid certain heal...

Hearing loss is the most common occupational disease in the United States, with noise serving as the presumed causative agent in most instances. This investigation characterizes the exposure conditions that facilitate the potentiation of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) by carbon monoxide (CO). Auditory function was compared in rats exposed 4 weeks earlier to noise alone, CO alone, combined ex...

With a view to understanding the air-fuel mixing behavior and the effects of the mixture quality on the emissions formation and engine performance, a new quantitative factor of the in-cylinder air-fuel homogeneity named Homogeneity Factor (HF) has been developed. Its characteristics under various injection conditions and air swirl motions within the cylinder have been investigated with CFD simu...

In set-top videoconferencing, the complete videoconferencing system ts unobtrusively on top of the television. The microphone sound pickup system is one of the most important functional blocks with constraints of small size, high performance, and low cost. Persons speaking several feet away from the system must be picked up satisfactorily while noise generated internally in the system by the co...

This paper presents a combined active noise control and noise reduction scheme for hearing aids to tackle secondary path effects and effects of signal leakage through the fitting. While such leakage contributions and the secondary accoustic path from the reciever to the tympanic membrane are usually not taken into account in standard noise reduction systems, they appear to have a non-negligible...

Fluctuations of the white-light supercontinuum produced by ultrashort laser pulses in selfguided filaments (spatio-temporal solitons) in air are investigated. We demonstrate that correlations exist within the white-light supercontinuum, and that they can be used to significantly reduce the laser intensity noise by filtering the spectrum. More precisely, the fundamental wavelength is anticorrela...