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THE deafening racket of a road drill, the thumping beat from a nightclub or the thunderous snoring of a partner—you’ll soon be able to silence them all, while the sounds you want to hear come through loud and clear.

That at least is the claim of Selwyn Wright an engineer at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, who has developed what he calls the Silence Machine. It works by analysing the stream of sound waves from a noise source, and generating sound that is exactly out of phase and neutralises the incoming sound waves.

The concept is already in…

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