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Science.

And that is to say, physics, medicine, nature, or space, time, the brain, life, the universe.

Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientists. This is the show where we bring you the

latest breakthroughs in science and technology with me Chris Smith and with Adam Murphy.

This week we are looking at the future of medicine, phenomics including the toilet that

analyzes what you put down it.

And in the news sending wine into, new insights into the origin of life

and why a lack of sleep might give you the munchies.

The Naked Scientists Podcast is powered by UKfast.co. UK.

Now first, do you have trouble understanding what others are saying in noisy places?

For instance does this background din make speech much harder to follow? If so, new research this out this week might explain why.

Researchers in the US have found that high frequency sounds play a key role in the

intelligibility of speech and if you can't hear them properly you

struggle in noisy places. But these critical frequencies are usually not

routinely checked in hearing tests, bizarrely and perhaps perhaps they ought to be, as Adam heard from Cincinnati

Children's Hospital, Ohio's Lena Mot Lagsader and David Moore.

So in a normal audiology exam, they generally check out frequencies between about 250

hurts and either 4,000 or 8,000 hurts, where 250 hertz is low pitch sound and 4, 8,000 are very high pitched.

But actually, healthy young people can hear up to 20,000

...