Imagine a world where a fly on the wall could help Grandpa Joe and James Bond. In July, researchers announced that one fly's hypersensitive ears had inspired a cutting-edge hearing device. Ormia ochracea, a parasitic fly species, needs extremely accurate directional hearing to target its prey, crickets. But the fly's ears are just half a millimeter apart - too close together to pinpoint a chirping cricket, which emits sound waves on a much larger scale, without some extra help. So O. ochracea relies on a seesaw-shaped mechanism to amplify the difference between what each ear hears. Researchers re-created the fly's unique mechanism by constructing a 2-millimeter rectangular silicon device with a fulcrumlike pivot supporting a tiny beam, similar to a seesaw. Pressure from sound waves flexes and rotates the beam to create an electric signal that's processed to determine sound direction - the same way O. ochracea does.
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