You might not be able to control their taste in music or their new fangled tastes in technology, but you can actually corral them like a couple of trendily dressed sheep. The secret behind it is kind of a bummer—naturally occurring hearing loss. Sound is made of pressure waves that alternate between compressing and stretching through air at a certain frequency. The higher the frequency, the higher the resulting pitch you’ll hear. Dogs have highly evolved hearing, which is how they can hear those fancy dog whistles and we can’t. While we’re born being able to hear a wide range of frequencies, this range narrows as we get older in a natural process called prebycusis. In an effort to take advantage of this deterioration, there is now a machine—the aptly named The Mosquito—that emits a high pitch frequency that, according to science, only those under the age of 24 can hear. How does this control the youths of the world? Put the machine in a spot where you’re sick of pesky kids loitering and—bingo—the sound gets so annoying to their bionic, youthful ears that they scatter to the wind. The downside of the sound? The kids have caught on and can make it a ringtone for their cell phone. Text message dings, us Old Ears are none the wiser.
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