Bok’s team developed an alternative approach. Even though it is thin and lightweight, their membrane transmits sound as well as the thick layer of material.

At the heart of the new device is a rubber sheet stretched across a metal frame with a weight at its center. That weight helps make sure that when it vibrates, it does so at the right frequency. This whole system floats atop the water. As underwater sound waves hit it, the device begins to vibrate. Its frame and rubber sheet vibrate at just the right frequency to help transmit that subsurface sound into the air.

Researchers have created a device that frees underwater sound to move through the water’s surface and into the air. It lets 30 percent of the sound come through. That’s 160 times more than usual!

And getting better nutrition offered no clear benefit. Scientists sampled fluid from the wounds. The group that drank the nutritional supplement did show a stronger immune response at the wound. But that didn’t speed the healing, Smith reports in the January Journal of Applied Physiology.

Sleep clearly helped. People who slept normally healed in about 4.2 days. The sleep-deprived volunteers took about 5 days to heal.

One group of 16 volunteers got a normal amount of sleep — seven to nine hours a night. The other two groups of 20 people each were kept sleep deprived. They got only two hours of sleep a night, for three nights in a row. To stay awake, the volunteers were asked to do things such as walk, play video games, watch TV, sit on an exercise ball or play ping-pong. Throughout the experiment, one of the sleep-deprived groups got a nutritional drink with extra protein and vitamins. The other group got a placebo drink: It looked and tasted the same but had no extra nutrition.

She and her team studied three groups of healthy people who came to their laboratory to take part in tests. They gave each recruit small skin wounds. Applying gentle suction on their forearms, they created blisters. Then they removed the tops of these blisters. (The procedure doesn’t hurt, although it can be itchy, Smith says.)

Now data show that getting enough Z’s might also get your cuts to heal more promptly. In fact, sleep was more important than good nutrition in speeding wound healing.

MacGregor’s team took a second look at these data. And it found that all the excess light came from a two-minute period on March 24. A massive flare explains all the extra light, MacGregor now says.

Observations show that over one 10-second period, the star got 1,000 times brighter. Then it dimmed again. This event can best be explained by an enormous stellar flare, explains a team of scientists in the February 26 Astrophysical Journal Letters.