could be. “If finding peace and quiet becomes difficult enough, many, many children will grow up without the experience and I think it’s a very real problem,” he said. The warning came as other scientists reported beneficial health effects from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, described preliminary experiments which suggest that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people recover from stressful events. In one experiment, Taff told participants who visited his lab to give an impromptu talk that would be judged by researchers standing behind a one-way mirror. Measurements of their heart rate and the stress hormone, cortisol, before and after the speech found that people calmed down faster when they listened to nature recordings than when the same audio tracks were interspersed with sounds from road traffic, aeroplanes and even normal conversation. “We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water,” Taff said. “We may be losing this as people are listening to iPods all the time but I do believe that the public is appreciative of these sounds. My advice is to go to your protected