How do your ears work and what kind of sound levels can damage your hearing? The five video tracks in this album explain basic concepts such as units of noise, sound insulation and noise control. Car manufacturers like Lexus have developed the quiet car, but this kind of technology benefits the driver, not the people living beside busy roads. Locals from a Derbyshire village explain how the construction of the A50 has affected their lives. The Transport Research Laboratory analyses tyre noise on road surfaces in order to create a definitive report on the state of Britain's roads.

This material forms part of T308 Environmental monitoring, modelling and control.

Are you driven to find out how things work, and want to know how they're made? Construction could be for you. Here's some advice on using your practical mind and hands-on skills to build bigger and better things.

In the UK there is a rush to build more homes. Is there a different way of making the houses we want to live in, that suits the ways we live in cities now?

It has been called a 'Big Bang Machine', but what is the Large Hadron Collider and what do scientists hope it will discover? Presented by Robert Llewellyn, the three video tracks in this album address the science of collisions, the purpose of particle acceleration and the construction of the LHC at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. This cutting edge machine may detect the elusive Higgs boson, and with it reveal the origin of mass, the missing piece in our understanding of matter. If it succeeds, it will begin the next era of research into the nature of the universe. This material forms part of The Open University course S207 The physical world.