There was a cute interdisciplinary study published today about bats and computers. Bats use echolocation to get around and find food, but scientists didn’t know how they could tell one plant from another. If you ever saw those pictures of a bat flying around, I always got the impression they just heard the echo. Do the echoes sound different off an apple than an orange? To understand this, the researchers developed an algorithm that can do the same thing.
Apparently it isn’t as hard as everyone thought it was once the researchers sat down and worked it out. Scientists in Germany recorded thousands of echoes from live plants of five different species. Then they created an algorithm that takes the time-frequency information from these echoes that could identify the plants.
The best part of this is that it uses physics to help understand an animal without hurting it in any way. Yay!
You can find a copy of the research paper here.
About Me
- Margaret Mallette
- Baltimore, MD, United States
- I love eating, but I'm no rich girl. So I started learning to really cook. I've started slow and I have been moving my way to more interesting and challenging things. I have no real training but I am a quick learner and love to talk food with others. I hope I can meet others like myself, I know there are a lot of us "foodies" out there.
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