There was an interesting report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was discussed in the Chicago Tribune, about Chinese torrent frogs being able to tune out all noises, except for the siren song of the opposite sex. Can you imagine the possibilities?
Seriously, when the frog is calling for a mate, a piece of cartilage in the eustachian tubes blocks out distracting noises. This was all found quite accidentally, as often happens:
quote:
Before they made the accidental discovery, Feng and his colleagues were measuring how the frog's unusually thin eardrum responded to different sounds. Suddenly, the eardrum stopped vibrating.
"We were scratching our heads," Feng said.
Shining a flashlight into its eustachian tubes, "we saw something, a dark shadow through this transparent eardrum," he said. "We said, wow, what's going on there?"
The team found that a muscle in the frog's head pulls a piece of cartilage and a curtain of tissue into the tube, "almost like an accordion or shower curtain," Feng said.
Previously, scientists thought frogs' eustachian tubes were never closed off.
But like the frog they can always hear it when their partners start to talk about sex. Amazing, really, considering how little chance they get to practise hearing this particular topic...
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
I wondered that, too, goofy. It may give them ideas for assisting elderly deaf people who often have problems hearing in crowds. I don't see it as that ignoble.
I'll plead guilty to having judged on incomplete evidence. I haven't read the full report - thus I don't know what they were studying, and what else they learned.
But if the featured finding is all they have, it isn't worth very much. The makers of hearing aids don't need to peer up a frog's nostril to know that hearing aids could be more useful (and perhaps more commercially successful) if they electronically accentuate or damp some kinds of sounds.
Stanislaw Ulam tells an anecdote in his memoirs about how as a young mathematics student in Poland, he and some friends prided themselves on studying some math problems which had no application in the real world. Years later at Los Alamos one of those problems he had worked through came in handy to solve a problem in the design of the first atomic bomb.
My wife already has a new hearing aid which has three different settings to dampen noises so she can hear speech better in restaurants, etc. It even has a little remote control to switch between the channels. She says it works very well.
Although when I asked her what kind it was, she said, "Three o'clock."
The original research report, where Albert Feng, professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Illinios, Urbana-Champaign is the lead researcher, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. I would have to read the original report before I could be so skeptical. It seems quite possible to me that those results could be useful in treating one type of deafness. We are all aware of Sir Alexander Fleming's accidental discovery.
