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posted by on Tuesday May 16 2017, @05:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-whisper-near-an-Ormia dept.

"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


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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:13AM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:13AM (#510858) Journal

    He said, *Obama's fly is open!* Turn up your damn hearing aid!

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
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