Tiny tubes could ease eavesdropping.Imagine tiny ears listening for whispers of microscopic life on Mars Scientists have long speculated about the possibility of life on Mars owing to the planet's proximity and similarity to Earth. It remains an open question whether life exists on Mars now, or existed there in the past. or rustlings of cells within the body. To create microphones more sensitive than any available today, a team of researchers is developing devices that resemble the microscopic, supersensitive hairs, or stereocilia, of the inner ear. The devices rely on structures that are even more responsive than stereocilia, which bend a few nanometers at the sound of rustling leaves, says Flavio Noca of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory “JPL” redirects here. For other uses, see JPL (disambiguation). Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a NASA research center located in the cities of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles, California, USA. in Pasadena, Calif. Noca and his colleagues are working with arrays of carbon nanotubes--hollow tubes of carbon, each one only several atom-widths in diameter. Noca described the research Dec. 5 at the joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society dedicated to increasing and diffusing the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. History The ASA was instigated by Wallace Waterfall, Floyd Watson, and Vern Oliver Knudsen. and NOISE-CON 2000 in Newport Beach, Calif. The team collaborated with Jimmy Xu of Brown University in Providence, R.I., to make highly ordered arrays that respond to sound. Xu is part of a group that in 1999 at the University of Toronto Research at the University of Toronto has been responsible for the world's first electronic heart pacemaker, artificial larynx, single-lung transplant, nerve transplant, artificial pancreas, chemical laser, G-suit, the first practical electron microscope, the first cloning of T-cells, first created these arrays. An acoustic sensor wasn't the aim of that work, says Xu. Nanoscale acoustic sensors might one day journey to Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa, suggests Noca. Or they may take a voyage through the body, looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. activity of cancer cells. The research could also improve hearing aids Hearing Aids Definition A hearing aid is a device that can amplify sound waves in order to help a deaf or hard-of-hearing person hear sounds more clearly. and reveal more about stereocilia, he adds. "This proposal of Noca and colleagues is exciting," comments Ray H. Baughman of Honeywell International in Morristown, N.J. "The challenge for realizing their dream of nanoscale ears will be in demonstrating effective mechanisms for converting the minute vibrations of carbon nanotubes to electrical signals, as well as in electrically wiring perhaps billions of nanotubes that are 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair," he says. |
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