Richard Dawkins, in either ‘The Selfish Gene’ or ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, describes the arms race between bats and insects. Quite a fascinating affair—just bats' own evolution is intriguing: how do they differentiate between their own and others' echolocation signals? Well they have a ‘code’ in the signal specific to each specimen. And then, insects ‘learn’ to mimic bats' signals so a bat thinks it's another bat there and not a dinner. Etc etc.<p>This discovery might be at least the third one this year in this same field, if another one mentioned in the article isn't the one I've seen on HN.
> Holderied says it could be possible to make materials ‘10 times more efficient at absorbing sounds than what we are using in our homes and offices’. Think sound-absorbing wallpaper, not panels, he adds.<p>I would love to have something like that. All these open floor plan offices and open concept homes are loud AF.
The Hawk moth has evolved to emit ultrasonic clicks that jam the bat sonar:<p><a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/moths-avoid-capture-talking-back-bats" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/moths-avoid-capture-...</a><p>Just more examples of the power of evolution.
Would be nice to understand how natural selection lead to this material and what were the steps. First you had a moth with some fur that absorbed maybe 0.1% ultrasound and then it started to increase from there generation and generation?
I know nothing about this kind of metamaterials [0] but would it be possible to replicate them at an industrial scale? For things such as superior acoustic insulation and so on?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/11/17/2014531117" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/11/17/2014531117</a>