Based on fly ears has been built. Ronald Miles (SUNY Binghamton) and his colleagues based their diaphragm on Ormia ochracea, a small parasitic fly that uses sound to track down its cricket host even in complete darkness. The fly can detect changes as small as two degrees in a sound’s direction. Such directional sensitivity—as good as humans’—is unexpected, since the fly’s ears are just a few hundred microns apart. Mammals’ ears, in contrast, are well separated from one another, so that differences in sound signals at the ears provide localization cues (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 52 11 1999 24 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.882727 November 1999, page 24 ). The fly’s hearing organs are a pair of mechanically coupled membranes: Sound waves incident on one membrane can deflect the other. With this coupling, the fly can obtain both the average pressure of an incoming sound and its pressure gradient, which...
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1 February 2002
February 01 2002