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PHOTOS: This Is The Quietest Place On Earth

PHOTOS: This Is The Quietest Place On Earth
Tech1 min read

IBM nanolab noisefree

IBM

Dr. Emanuel Lörtscher, the architect of the quietest room on earth, looks out through a hole in the wall.

There is a place in Zurich, Switzerland, where sound virtually doesn't exist. That place is known as the "noise-free" labs, part of IBM's $90 million Nanotechnology facility located there.

The rooms dampen sound so thoroughly that if you put an ear close to a wall, your inner ear will "become unbalanced and you'll feel dizzy and start vomiting," the architect of the room, Dr. Emanuel Loertscher, told the Register's Gavin Clarke.

IBM needs these sound-proof rooms to work with nanotechnology, the smallest tech on earth. The things built on the nanoscale are so impossibly tiny that sound vibrations will jiggle them around, making it hard to work on them.

IBM is doing all kinds of stuff in this noise-free world, from making making computer chips the size of human cells to silly stuff, like making the world's smallest movie starring a bunch of atoms.

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