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posted by martyb on Thursday July 09 2015, @02:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the Lindsay-Wagner-says-she-has-first-dibs dept.

In case you can't get enough news about graphene:

As a species, humans have evolved to have certain strengths and weaknesses. While we don't have the sonar-like range finding capabilities of bats or dolphins, we do have the brains to engineer a device that can give that capability to us.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have done exactly that in their development of tiny ultrasonic microphones made from graphene.

[...] At only one atom in thickness, graphene possesses the key properties of strength, stiffness, and light weight; so it is extremely sensitive to a wide-range of frequencies. In this case, the microphone can pick up frequencies from across the human hearing range—from subsonic (below 20 hertz) to ultrasonic (above 20 kilohertz)—and as high as 500 kHz. (A bat hears in the 9 kHz to 200 kHz range.)

Daredevil, here we come!

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:28AM (#206759)
    It's called passive sonar.
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:58AM

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:58AM (#206855) Journal

    Beamformers.

    One captures the acoustical signal from several transducers at known locations.

    The acquired waveforms are each broken down by Fast Fourier Transform into frequency and phase and are correlated to each other.

    ( It is important that the actual digitization from all acoustical receivers is synchronous. Differences in arrival time is how the vectors are calculated. )

    This makes doppler shifts stand out like a sore thumb.

    What you will get is a very detailed vector to whatever is making the noise as well as how fast and in which direction.

    Funny thing... you know how you can recognize a person by their voice? Every submarine in the world sounds different too! There are so many things that "flavor" the tone of a submarine's drive train acoustics that no two sound alike.

    Interested? Google "sonobuoy". [google.com]

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]