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"These flies have highly specialized ears that provide the most acute directional hearing of any animal," says Andrew Mason, a professor of biology at U of T Scarborough. "The mechanism that makes their hearing so exceptional has even led to a range of bio-inspired technology, like the mini directional microphones used in hearing aids."
[... W]hat makes the fly truly remarkable is its mechanically-coupled ears. Unlike most animals that have two separate ears, both of Ormia's eardrums are connected together, kind of like a seesaw with a rigid joint in the middle that can bend. When one of eardrums vibrates from a sound wave it pushes the other, and the tiny time difference it takes to activate one ear drum allows the fly to figure out which direction the sound is coming from.
"It's interesting that something so small can be sensitive to the direction of sound," says Mason. "They're tiny relative to the wavelength of sound they're able to localize, so they shouldn't be able to do what they do but they can because of the mechanical coupling."
Engineers are interested in using the same principle found in Ormia's coupled eardrums to develop artificial sensors. These sensors could better locate signals for a range of uses where the size of the object relative to the signal might be a limiting factor -- from hearing aids, to gunshot detectors, to different types of radar.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dak664 on Tuesday May 16 2017, @07:54PM (3 children)
Ever since ATSC video transmission when I am completely relaxed and there is a low level source of white noise (wind or ceiling fan) I can hear dialogue on the strong local TV station, particularly early morning and late evening weather reports. Just a couple KHz bandwidth, enough to distinguish the different voices and maybe 1/5 of the words. I have no idea how I could be decoding the AC3 bitstream of a constant amplitude RF signal, but possibly there is some FM audio component when there is a low video bit rate of a talking head.
Makes me wonder what other communications might be discoverable. Others have had the same idea http://www.rhine.org [rhine.org]
Of course most would dismiss this out of hand as batshit crazy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday May 16 2017, @08:52PM (2 children)
You're not crazy. I can hear radio stations in my head. By hear, I don't mean hear the words or music or anything, but I'm perceiving it. How do I know? I start singing the damn song :)
What I found was that when that feeling came, I could turn the radio on and find the song. A few times, the song in my head matched the radio to the extent that I was nearly perfectly aligned with the song. That was weird and pretty cool.
My take away from that is that we don't really understand what a human is capable of perceiving. Many animals, which by the way I think they meant insect, demonstrate the ability to sense magnetic waves through a symbiosis with small bacteria that are sensitive to it. It's how birds are able to navigate so well. I fully believe that human beings are perceiving these things to some extent, and you only need a few cues and memories triggered before you are signing a song.
It's like Whistler from Sneakers hearing the whine in the emergency lights that nobody else can hear.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
You're not crazy. I can hear radio stations in my head.
Yeah he is, and so are you. I know who you all are. You go around the office all day singing *You are the apple of my life...* The least you could do is tune into a different station. Get the filling replaced, whatever it takes...
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday May 18 2017, @12:59AM
Fuck you. I already told you that I can sing at a reasonable volume until 11am. You keep messing with me and I'll set the building on fire.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.