Absolute Silence: Exploring the World's Quietest Room

And what's common between kale, broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage?

Imagine a room so silent your ears ring and panic sets in within minutes. Welcome to the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis - officially the quietest place on earth.

At -9.4 decibels, the background noise in this padded, isolated room is almost imperceptible. Even quiet concert halls measure around 15 decibels. Normal conversation hits 60 decibels.

In the chamber's oppressive silence, you hear every crack of your knuckles, crunch of your joints, and rush of blood. External noise is utterly eliminated while internal sounds are amplified.

Without reflected sounds, your senses grow confused. Eyes see a room yet ears detect no acoustic indications of walls or space. This sensory mismatch creates profound disorientation.

The stillness soon becomes suffocating. Few endure more than 45 minutes before succumbing to nausea, heart palpitations, hallucinations. The longest record is just over an hour.

So why build a room devoid of noise? These meticulously engineered chambers are designed to stop reflections or echoes of sound. They are used to conduct experiments by eliminating all reflected sounds, they simulate outdoor ‘free field’ conditions indoors, meaning that there are no reflected signals. All sound energy will be traveling away from the source with almost none reflected back.

Far from meditative, though, the experience often proves too much for the human psyche. Profound silence contradicts our fundamental sensory relationship with the environment. Like oxygen, we only appreciate noise once deprived of it, reminds how deeply sound saturates our realities.

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Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single plant specie!

You may never have heard of the plant Brassica Oleracea, but six vegetables you eat on a regular basis are actually all from this one plant and they're all human-made products of selective breeding.

Its pretty interesting that kale and cabbage — along with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, and kohlrabi, and several other vegetables — all come from the exact same plant species: Brassica oleracea.
Though they're all the same species, these various crops are cultivars — different varieties bred to have desirable qualities for human purposes.

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