Word: sonar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...beyond the limit of human hearing, the high-pitched hunting cry of the bat makes the dark dangerous for night-flying insects. Bat chirps bounce off their tiny bodies like sonar pulses, giving their position away to the swooping enemy. Yet despite the bat's delicate detection equipment, many an insect escapes-and scientists have long wondered why. In the current issue of the American Scientist, Biologists Kenneth Roeder and Asher E. Treat explain how they pried into the defensive secrets of the noctuid moth, an insect that has demonstrated singular evasive skill...
Having analyzed the moth's sonar-detecting apparatus in the laboratory, Roeder and Treat tried it out in the field against real bats. They set up their apparatus on a Massachusetts hillside, and at nightfall their wired moth began to detect the ultrasonic cries of bats. From the traces on their oscillograph, the biologists could tell whether an invisible bat was approaching or flying away. Later, when Roeder and Treat turned on a powerful floodlight, they could watch the bats diving on their prey and hear, through the captive moth's ear, the bats' searching sonar beeps...
...handful of students lift their wineglasses to toast the sunrise after an all-night question-and-answer session with a professor of aerodynamics. In a laboratory a computer expert works on a pet project: developing an artificial nose that can smell. Around the campus, research teams study the sonar system of the bat in flight, assemble atoms into crystals capable of withstanding extraordinary stress, inquire into "the feasibility of controlling manipulative devices molded after human arms and hands by means of a general-purpose computer." And at their switchboards operators tirelessly greet the thousands of callers to UNiversity...
...much shallower water, stationed herself off La Jolla, where the ocean is 3,140 ft. deep. Four outboard propellers driven by 200-h.p. engines churned the water fore and aft, but, according to plan, the ship did not move. Buoys moored 1,000 ft. away carried transponders to repeat sonar waves sent to them underwater. Pilot Ernie Cantu watched a sonarscope showing the ship's position in relation to the fixed buoys. When Cuss I tended to get out of position, Cantu worked a wheel and a joy stick that changed the speed and direction of the four propellers...
...commanders got around the language barrier by carrying out maneuvers via the International General Signal Book. As the Odax pulled every trick in the submariner's book, the South Americans learned the newest ship-maneuvering techniques, how to handle the most modern MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) and sonar gear to track, corner and kill the sub. Sonar operators even learned how to tell the type of sub by the quality of its "ping...