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Daniel Kish had both eyes removed at the age of 13 months after being diagnosed with retinoblastoma, an aggressive form of cancer. He didn’t let that slow him down. Though blind he can mountain bike, navigate the wilderness alone and recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. Kish is president of a nonprofit organization called World Access for the Blind. World Access offers training on how to interact with one’s environment, using echolocation as a primary tool. Kish hears echos and interprets their meaning to visualize objects, similar to the way bats, beluga whales and dolphins ”see” objects.
He can hear the variation between a wall and a bush and a chain-link fence. Bounce a tennis ball off a wall, Kish says, then off a bush. Different response. So too with sound. Given a bit of time, he can echolocate something as small as a golf ball. Sometimes, in a parking garage, he can echolocate the exit faster than a sighted person can find it.
Link – Via Book of Joe
Rowan, a German Spitz, was born without eyes. But he’s able to navigate by barking and listening to the echo:
Mrs Orchard who breeds dogs at Spilmah Home Boarding in Potton, near Biggleswade, Beds added: “‘When he’s running around in the open it’s just as if he were the same as the rest of my dogs.
”When he first started going out there were no leaves on the trees but when the leaves grew there was the rustling and we noticed the change in his behaviour.
‘He would go out and to find his direction he would use his bark. It really does seem to be a form of echolocation.
You can watch a video of the dog at the link.
Link via Urlesque | Photo: Express.co.uk
Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a helmet that helps visually impaired people make use of echolocation to find their way around:
The system takes real-time imagery of local obstacles, be they stairs, walls, or trees, as well as moving objects like cars and other people, and alerts the wearer using the sounds perfected in the Spanish echolocation system mentioned above.
The helmet uses stereo headphones to denote where the objects are relative to the wearer, and the volume of the sound indicates the distance. The device has a 60-degree range of vision, and can identify objects as far away as 15 feet. The researchers are also currently looking to integrate GPS data into the rig, so that users can use it to plot specific courses.
Scientists have been puzzled over the purpose of the Tiger Moth’s tymbal organ membrane, which is able to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. The consensus is that it serves as a warning to bats, since the moths are able to retain poisons harvested from host plants. Scientists believed the moths who were poisonous were warning the bats, and those that weren’t were faking it anyways.
New experiments by Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University, however, have confirmed another theory: the moths are actually using the fast paced clicking to jam the bats’ echolocation. It is the first evidence of sonar jamming in nature:
Normally, a bat attack starts with relatively intermittent sounds. They then increase in frequency—up to 200 cries per second—as the bat gets closer to the moth “so it knows where the moth is at that critical moment,” Corcoran explains. But his research showed that just as bats were increasing their click frequency, moths “turn on sound production full blast,” clicking at a rate of up to 4,500 times a second. This furious clicking by the moths reversed the bats’ pattern—the frequency of bat sonar decreased, rather than increased, as it approached its prey, suggesting that it lost its target.
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