New Delhi: Bats are known to be blind and travel using echolocation, a technique to determine the location of different objects using sound waves. But scientists have been confused for long about how exactly this works when they’re travelling in large numbers.
Now, researchers from Germany and Israel have found an answer.
In their peer-reviewed study published last month in PNAS journal, researchers tried to answer a pertinent question: when bats emerge from their caves at night, sometimes hundreds and thousands at once, how does their echolocation work? How do they not collide with each other? It is after a “cocktail party nightmare” of echo signals that must get mixed up.
But apparently bats have a way around. It is true that at the moment all bats emerge together, 95 percent of their echolocation signals are jammed. But within five seconds, bats fan out and try to increase their distance from the cave and each other, while at the same time emitting shorter distance signals at higher frequencies. This ensures they can figure out the location of the bat nearest to them, through which they can avoid colliding with each other.
The researchers tracked the movement of tens of bats simultaneously, while recording the echolocation of some individual ones. Read More
World’s smallest pacemaker, tinier than grain of rice
Pacemakers are for regulating heart arrhythmia and delivering electrical pulses to help the heart beat normally. Now, there’s a pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice.
Scientists from the US and Singapore have developed the world’s smallest pacemaker yet. It measures just 1.8 mm in width and 3.5 mm in length, and is especially suited for the tiny fragile hearts of newborn babies.
Pacemakers are temporary devices and are often inserted using surgery with wires attached outside the body, but this new pacemaker is different.
It can be inserted with an injection, through a non-invasive procedure. More importantly, the pacemaker is made entirely dissolvable, so that once the patient no longer requires it, the device will dissolve on its own and doesn’t need to be surgically removed.
The peer-reviewed paper describing the pacemaker was published Wednesday in Nature journal. It suggests that the technology can be used in the future for several medical procedures, including wound therapy, pain management and bone regeneration. Read More
More cardiac arrest deaths during day-night heatwaves
A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology looks at how compound heatwaves i.e. heatwaves that last both during the day and night increase risk of cardiac arrest deaths.
The study by Chinese researchers found a non-linear relationship between heatwaves and cardiac mortality, which means that researchers looked at more factors than just the duration of heatwaves and the number of cardiac arrests. To get a more complete picture of how heatwaves affect heart disease, other factors including type of heatwave, cumulative heat load, and intensity of heatwave were introduced.
By analysing over 2.4 million cardiac deaths in China, they found that compound day-night heatwaves increased the heat pressure and as a result also increased mortality risk. The study is important to understand the exact effects of heatwaves on human health and for preventative and palliative measures. Read More
Solar cells made with moon dust
Scientists in Germany are trying to make solar cells for space using moon dust or regolith. A peer-reviewed study published in the Cell Press journal Device this month documented how these scientists have created solar cells to convert sunlight into solar energy by using glass made from the moon’s regolith.
This is an attempt to make essential commodities for space exploration using material available in space like regolith. While Earth-made solar cells that are currently used in space missions have almost 40 percent efficiency, they are also heavy to carry since they are made from glass, and expensive too.
By using lunar regolith, not only does the cost and weight go down, but it also increases the number of cells that can be used since moon dust is available aplenty.
While this is a promising avenue, the team is still unsure of how microgravity conditions on the moon might affect the production and usage of these cells. The researcher said they hope they can launch an experiment on the moon soon to test their new cells. Read More
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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That’s because the Chinese eat them and therefore they cannot “emerge from the caves”.