This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga.

Got a minute?

Unless you have a pair of noise cancelling headphones,

flying can be annoying to the ears.

A lot of low pitched rumbling makes it into the cabin.

Problem is, the wings, floors, ceilings, and bulkheads

are lined with a lightweight material with a honeycomb structure,

which adds structural integrity to the aircraft, but engine and airflow sound cuts right through.

The physical loss says that the lighter the material is the worst it could block the sound.

Ewan Jeng is an acoustician at North Carolina State University.

In a quest for quiet, he and his colleagues constructed a similar material, but with a quarter millimeter

thin layer of latex stretched across the cells of the honeycomb.

In tests, the latex lace structure cut the intensity of low frequency rumbling to a thousandth of its previous level.

Enough, he says, to make an airplane cabin sound more like a peaceful living room.

The studies in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Problem is the material Jing developed is 6% heavier than the standard stuff, and more weight

means more fuel means more expense. But if we settled for a slightly quieter flight,

Ching says he could use less latex, making the noise blocking honeycomb just a few percent

heavier. Considering that the honeycomb is already one of the lightest parts of an airplane,

you're then looking at only a modest plane weight gain.

Of course, that's assuming everyone wants a quieter plane.

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