Sound Thinking

The first of two science news items for EP this morning. Danish scientists, who thought to study something that's been routinely accepted — nerves transmit information via electricity — didn't find any heat produced during nerve impulses, a violation of the laws of thermodynamics if electricity were involved. Their explanation: nerves propagate information via sound. Interesting. And combine that with two other recent reports, the first from German scientists that axons as well as dendrites are sending signals, thus implying a rather more chaotic brain environment than previously understood, and the second, from Middle Tennessee State University that sound pulses can travel faster than the speed of light, and what have you got? The ingredients for some good science fiction, at least, and a number of hypotheticals about how we react to sound in our environment.