[Right Wing Assault]

Source of sound pulses? Frequency? Have they been measured? Can we make our own and interfere with them? So many questions!

[Lexington Green]

O-O-O-O-M-M-M-M-H-H

[Red Badger]

Well that explains why loud Hip-Hop cars in traffic gets on my nerves............

[DungeonMaster]

All science is physics.

[cmet]

Makes one wonder if screaming when in pain might be a way the body tries to mitigate the pain by overriding the "sound waves" in the nerve paths.

[LurkedLongEnough]

Thanks. Very interesting!

[Psycho_Bunny]

They're going to need to offer up a little more info.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Until then, this article is probably BS.

[Enchante]

Maybe this will help to explain why the sound of Shrillery's voice makes me feel actual physical pain -- she must be able to activate my nerves and influence the sound that is transmitted through them!

[true_blue_texican]

bttt

[6ppc]

according to the physicists – the fact that the nerve pulse does not produce heat contradicts the molecular biological theory of an electrical impulse produced by chemical processes. Instead, nerve pulses can be explained much more simply as a mechanical pulse according to the two physicists. And such a pulse could be sound. i>

Sounds like they haven't actually proved this. It occured to me that the lack of heat could also be explained if it turned out that nerves are actually superconductors.

I'm not a physicist and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but isn't my explanation as feasible as theirs? (Just trying to stir the pot!)

[TChris]

It should be relatively simple to test nerves for minute pressure changes in response to stimuli, shouldn't it? This theory appears to be relatively simple to confirm, to my non-scientific mind.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

A SCIENTIST, huh? Doesn't he know that sound waves produce heat too as they travel through a substance?

[rbookward]

Ahh. That explains why EEGs don't work. Acustics instead of electricity, therefore no electro-magnetic waves to pick up.

Do I need a sarc tag?

[xenophiles]

"But for us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation. The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced,"

Do these "physicists" understand that a nerve impulse is not a simple electrical current? That a spontaneous reaction need not generate heat? According to their calculations, how much heat should a nerve cell produce when it fires? And how did they measure the heat produced by a nerve cell with enough precision to rule it out? If they get this far they will have a major scientific breakthrough.

Whether they do or not, the stuff about sound might have some scientific value too. But it fails the random sentence test, so I won't bother with it until/unless they clean it up.

[Ranxerox]

...The membrane of the nerve is composed of lipids, a material that is similar to olive oil. This material can change its state from liquid to solid with temperature. The freezing point of water can be lowered by the addition of salt. Likewise, molecules that dissolve in membranes can lower the freezing point of membranes. The scientists found that the nerve membrane has a freezing point, which is precisely suited to the propagation of these concentrated sound pulses. Their theoretical calculations lead them to the same conclusion: Nerve pulses are sound pulses...

Oy.

With regards to the bolded text: so can every other material.

Either the author of this article didn't have a clue about the subject as it was explained to him, or it's just a load of theoretical BS. It definitely lost something in translation.

[colorado tanker]

A scientific "consensus" that was wrong??? Can't be!

[Right Wing Assault]

What is the difference between an extraordinary proof and a proof? If I can prove something with a simple proof, why do they demand an extraordinary proof.

Also, "proof" is a poor word to choose for scientific use. Math does proofs. Science does experiments that either support (to varying degrees) or do not support hypotheses.

[Malsua]

So does this mean that they need to re-jig the reasons why the machines enslaved us in "The Matrix"?

They have to rework that scene:

Morpheus: What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this:

[holds up a Duracell battery]

[holds up an iPod]