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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:44AM (#510871)

    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

    by edIII (791) on Thursday May 18 2017, @12:59AM (#511475)

    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.