An advance in sound detection: Spider webs

Smithsonian Magazine writes about how spider webs efficiently pick up sounds in frequency 1 Hz to 50 kHz range. Humans hear sounds in a frequency range of ~20 Hz to ~20 kHz. SM writes:

To make microphones more powerful and sensitive, they need to be larger—a reality that’s incompatible with the general desire for smaller and more transportable technology.

“Humans, being arrogant animals, fashioned the microphone after their own ears—but that’s not necessarily the best way to do it,” Miles tells Scientific American’s Elizabeth Anne Brown. “If you want to make something small, you should think about how small animals do it.”

Spiderwebs are less affected by changes in air pressure. Instead, they vibrate in the airflow created by a sound wave, allowing the arachnids to “hear” by feeling that motion—and even pinpoint the direction of the noise.

Using the orb webs of bridge spiders on the Binghamton University campus, Miles and Jian Zhou, who is also a mechanical engineer at the university, led tests of their sensitivities. They measured how the webs moved with a laser vibrometer and found that spider silk registered sounds between 1 hertz and 50 kilohertz—a much wider range than the 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz that humans can hear.

By applying this sort of acoustic system to a microphone, “you can make it quite a bit smaller without paying a price,” Miles tells the New York Times’ Jordan Pearson.

The research presents a jumping-off point for a variety of advances in sound technology. Miles and others are working to develop new instruments that can register extremely quiet sounds emitted by the human ear, which might help detect and treat hearing problems in infants, reports the New York Times. And spider silk-inspired acoustic systems may enable researchers to pick up on other sounds outside the human ear’s range—such as low-frequency noises that precede the formation of tornadoes, which scientists can use to predict and track the storms.

Human ears emit quiet sounds? Good grief, what next? Plants can talk? 

Oh yeah, plants do talk. I forgot. But, now there will be better microphones to hear plants chatting to each other. 😊 

By Germaine: Knowledge seeker