Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

Sounding Board for the Sun?

Scientists that work on the Ulysses mission have made an astounding discovery.  They have found that sounds generated deep inside the Sun cause our own planet to shake and vibrate in sympathy.  Not only does the Sun ring like a giant bell, so do we.

We’ve known for a long time that the Sun rings like a bell.  Solar seismology, or helioseismology, like its terrestrial counterpart, relies heavily on the principles of refraction.  In the Earth, pressure waves from an earthquake bend towards new directions when they strike the boundary between, say, the mantle and the denser core.  The Sun is gaseous and lacks such sharp boundaries, but its temperature, density and composition change between its surface and the core. Because the speed of sound depends on the temperature and average mass of gas particles, gradual changes with depth bend the path of a sound wave. Eventually, refraction will redirect a sound wave descending into the Sun to an upward path towards the surface.

Individual sound waves get trapped between the Sun’s surface and its interior at a depth set by the speed of sound at that point.  This forms acoustic cavities and the waves resonate within them, just like they do in musical instruments.  This causes the Sun to ring.  Our star is a million-mile-wide bell.The recent research from Ulysses shows evidence that Earth moves to the rhythm of the Sun.  The data show that distinct, isolated tones, generated by pressure and gravity waves in the Sun, are present in a wide variety of terrestrial systems.  Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, and even voltages induced on ocean cables, are all taking part in this cosmic sing-along.

The Spaceship Ulysses

Although these tones are all around us, we can’t hear them, even if we listen very closely.  Their pitch is much too low for the human ear, typically 100-5000 microHertz (1 microHertz corresponds to 1 vibration every 278 hours).  This is more than 12 octaves below the lowest note audible to humans.
But if even if you have only a little science geek in your makeup, you’re probably screaming bloody murder right about now.  That’s because you know something that most science fiction moviemakers ignore.  Sound travels in waves, but unlike light waves, radio waves, microwaves and gamma waves; sound waves require a medium in which to propagate.  In non-science geek terms, sound waves have to travel through matter.  When the alien spaceship is hit with phaser fire and explodes, there is NO noise because sound waves can’t travel through a vacuum.

So . . .. how can the sound waves generated by the Sun be affecting us here on the Earth?
The scientists with the Ulysses mission believe the key to the problem is magnetism.  They suggest that the sound waves that make it through to the Sun’s surface influence the vast magnetic field that’s also generated by our parent star.  Part of this magnetic field is then carried away from the Sun by the solar wind, where it can be detected by space probes like Ulysses.

The magnetic field of the solar wind then interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field and causes it to vibrate in sympathy, retaining the characteristic signals of the bell-like sound waves.  The motions of the geomagnetic field then couple into the solid Earth to produce small, but easily detectable responses as Earth and our technological systems, move to the rhythm of the Sun.

Harnessing the Energy

So after the Sun’s light, sound and fury reach Earth, what do we do with it?  Well, researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets.  The scientists say that the process is simple and that someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers.  Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.

Unlike conventional solar cells made of silicon, these cells are made of plastic and are therefore organic since they’re made of carbon.  The science goes something like this.    When sunlight falls on an organic solar cell, the energy generates positive and negative charges. If the charges can be separated and sent to different electrodes, then a current flows. If not, the energy is wasted. If you link the cells electronically the cells form what is called a panel, like the ones currently seen on the occasional rooftop.  The size of both the cell and panels vary.  Cells can range from 1 millimeter to several meters; panels have no size limits.

The solar cell developed at NJIT uses a carbon nanotubes complex, 50,000 times smaller than a human hair.  Just one nanotube conducts electrical current better than any conventional electrical wire.   The researchers also used tiny carbon buckyballs to form snake-like structures.  Buckyballs trap electrons, although they can't make electrons flow.  Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs grab the electrons.  Nanotubes, behaving like copper wires, then make the electrons or current flow.  Are you ready for printable solar panels?  They may be just around the corner!

A Pretty OLD Baby
Scientists have recently been oohing and aahing over a new baby.  Well, actually a very old baby.  One that’s been dead for at least 10,000 years.  She may have lived fast and died young, but she has left a beautiful corpse.  She was discovered by a reindeer herder, Yuri Khudy, in mid-May in western Siberia, after she eroded out of a riverbank.  ‘She’ is an almost perfectly preserved 4-month-old female woolly mammoth. She is the best and most complete mammoth carcass ever found and she stood 3 feet tall and measured 52 inches from the base of her trunk to her tail.  In her current, partially freeze-dried state, she weighs 110 pounds, including the traces of ice and dirt that still cling to her body.
	A10,000 year old baby (Credit: Daniel Fisher, University of Michigan)

The animal's trunk and eyes and the rest of its external soft tissues are virtually intact, though most of her hair is gone.  Her tail and right ear lobe have been chewed off, probably by arctic foxes or other scavengers that fed on the carcass after it eroded from the riverbank.

No tusks are externally visible, but X-rays revealed the presence of nascent tusks—no larger than a human's little finger—as well as molars.  Mammoth tusks grew in layers that can be used to age the animal, much like a tree's annual growth rings can be counted to determine its age.  But in the case of mammoth tusks, the layers can pinpoint the age to within weeks.

This little girl will help scientists determine things like birthing season for mammoth calves and how fast they grew and how their teeth developed.  She will also help them develop a better ability to determine the age of other mammoths and get a better sense of when they matured and when they reproduced.
She may have died young, but she will contribute extensively to the human knowledge of these magnificent animals.

Superbird!	A common bird of Central and Southern Asia has some very uncommon abilities.  Bar-headed geese are often bred in captivity as domestic garden birds.  In the wild, they migrate annually between India and the Tibetan plateau in China, flying over the world’s highest mountains on their way.
A bar-headed goose

To soar over the Himalayas, these geese must fly at altitudes up to 5.5 miles.  That’s the equivalent of humans running a marathon at the altitudes commercial airlines fly.

Even at rest, we humans struggle to cope with the low oxygen levels found at high altitude.  Mountaineers train for years before attempting to reach the peak of Mount Everest, where less than a quarter of the oxygen at sea level is available.  Some members of the highest human settlement -- La Rinconada, a mining village in Peru over three miles above sea level -- still suffer from lifelong symptoms of mountain sickness including headaches, nausea and sleep disorders.

Scientists have known that the blood of bar-headed geese, specifically their hemoglobin, is better at holding onto oxygen than the blood of low-altitude birds. But they’ve also suspected that something else is going on.  Researchers have recently learned that instead of taking more frequent breaths when oxygen levels are low, bar-headed geese take much deeper breaths.

They take in almost twice as much air per breath as low-altitude birds and thus extract a lot more oxygen.  Since they can also carry more oxygen in their blood, this allows bar-headed geese to send more oxygen to their flight muscles, fueling the metabolism required to fly.

This new insight allows scientists to better understand the limitations of human physiology and potentially find ways to exceed them.