Orb-Weaving Spiders Use Their Webs to Detect Sound

The finding was born from an unexpected dilemma: Ron Miles, a mechanical engineer, has dedicated a significant portion of his career to figuring out how to build more effective microphones. To do this, he and his team regularly study animals without eardrums, which provide key insights into how air movement and pressure changes are perceived together. This particular part of Miles’ research involved bridge spiders, a type of orb-weaving spider which are not known to have ears at all.

Miles and his colleagues at Binghamton University and Cornell University gave 60 bridge spiders their own 12 square inch containers in which to construct webs. Once the webs were built, the researchers took individual spider and web pairs to a soundproof room equipped with echo-reducing foam. Then they directed speakers at the spiders’ webs and played tones mimicking various predators and prey, all the while testing different angles and distances from which the sounds came.

The spiders responded by flattening their bodies, turning to the side, or extending their front legs. They also turned toward the speaker when it played sounds from the spider’s side. Even sounds that were undetectable to the researchers themselves (and came from a tiny, coin-sized speaker) elicited action from the spiders, who moved strands of silk in response.

According to the researchers, this reveals that orb-weaving spiders (the type you’ll typically find weaving spiral-shaped webs in your garden) “outsource” their hearing to their aerodynamic silk webs. A single strand of silk was shown to be capable of moving with a velocity virtually identical to that of the surrounding air, allowing the spiders to weave webs that could function as “huge acoustic antennae.”

“By outsourcing its acoustic sensors to its web, the spider is released from body size constraints and permits the araneid spider to increase its sound-sensitive surface area enormously, up to 10,000 times greater than the spider itself,” the study reads. It was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The spider also enables the flexibility to functionally adjust and regularly regenerate its external ‘eardrum’ according to its needs.”

Because microphones are traditionally made to sense only pressure changes, the insight gleaned during Miles’ team’s study may be used to design microphones that pick up on sensing the flow of air in a given sound field.

Continue reading

NASA Created a Collection of Spooky Space Sounds for Halloween

NASA's latest data release turns signals from beyond Earth into spooky sounds that are sure to send a chill up your spine.

Astronomers Might Finally Know the Source of Fast Radio Bursts

A trio of new studies report on an FRB within our own galaxy. Because this one was so much closer than past signals, scientists were able to track it to a particular type of neutron star known as a magnetar.

Report: Intel Will Outsource Core i3 Production to TSMC’s 5nm Node

This would be the first time the chip giant has built one of its Core CPUs on a different company's process node. It's not an exaggeration to call this a pivotal moment in Intel's history.

Source Code Stolen from Cyberpunk 2077 Developer Reportedly Sold

Polish game developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR) announced earlier this week that it had been the victim of a ransomware hack. As part of the operation, the attackers stole internal documents and source code, which they threatened to sell if CDPR declined to pay the ransom. Cybersecurity experts now say that the hacking group has followed through and sold the stolen data for an undisclosed sum.