Word: blood
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...airplanes landing, motorcycles roaring or a bedmate snoring can make for patchy sleep and strained nerves. But even when you manage to slumber through a rackety night, your body still registers the noise by raising blood pressure, according to a small new study...
Volunteers living near four major European airports with night flights - in Athens, Milan, Stockholm and London - took part in the study published this week in the European Heart Journal. Study participants were outfitted with ambulatory blood pressure monitors, which were programmed to take readings at 15-min. intervals throughout the night. The volunteers' bedrooms were also equipped with an MP3 recorder and a noise-meter, which recorded all ambient noise, its timing and its volume. Researchers considered a "noise event" to have occurred if any sound, from road traffic, aircraft or a partner's snoring, exceeded 35 decibels...
Researchers found that people's blood pressure rose reliably in response to a noise event, even when it wasn't loud enough to wake them. The response was consistent across all sources of sound, whether from the runway or the other side of the bed. Airplane noise, for example, caused an average 6.2 mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure (the pressure of blood in the artery when the heart contracts - i.e., the larger, top number) and a 7.4 mmHg increase in diastolic pressure (when the heart relaxes between beats). A snoring partner and road traffic had similar impact...
...participants, aged 45 to 70, who had lived at least five years near a major European airport. Researchers found that nighttime airport noise was linked to a significant increase in risk for hypertension; every 10 dB increase in exposure led to a corresponding 14% rise in high blood pressure risk. In addition, the study found, daily exposure to road traffic noise (at average levels above 65 dB) led to a more than 50% increased risk of hypertension - but, curiously, only among men, not women...
...that haven't even been invented yet - for his villain in No Country for Old Men. The leading actor award went to Daniel Day-Lewis, whose speech seemed designed to show everyone that he's not really as scary as he comes across on screen in There Will Be Blood: "Some of us put away childish things and some of us don't ... and [actors] need playmates, otherwise we're just playing with ourselves - and I've worked with some people who prefer to do that." Tilda Swinton won best supporting actress for her role in Michael Clayton and promised...