As a hunting bat closes in on a flying insect, its echolocation calls get closer and closer together, and shorter and shorter in duration. The calls, more than 160 per second, give the bat rapid-fire information on the location of its ever-moving prey.

To the human ear, the calls register as one continuous sound. Researchers call it the “terminal buzz,” and until recently, scientists did not fully understand how bats produced it.

Bats use muscles in the larynx to produce sound, just like humans, but scientists had never found a mammal muscle that could turn on and off that quickly.

"You can tap your finger on a table, and you can try to tap your finger as fast as you possibly can," said Andy Mead, a biology graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Eventually, your muscles seize up and you can’t tap any faster, Mead said. “You can probably tap five, six, seven times a second if you really try.”

As part of a research team led by Coen Elemans from the University of Southern Denmark , Mead found muscles in a bat larynx that could turn on and off in less than one one-hundredth of a second, firing up to 180 times a second.

"It was instantaneously really shocking and exciting to see yes, this is a very, very fast muscle," Mead said.

The discovery marked the first evidence of a “superfast” muscle in a mammal. Superfast muscles are responsible for the rattle of a rattlesnake and the mating call of the bottom-dwelling toadfish and some songbirds, but the discovery of the muscles in mammals leads researchers to believe they may be more common than they thought. They are also key to the evolutionary success of bats, which are the only flying mammals to use echolocation to hunt.

See the original story from our partners at WHYY.

Additional Links

• Scientific community unites to save bats: Bats are dying at rapid rates of the mysterious white nose syndrome. Learn about efforts in Pennsylvania to study the disease.

Bio-inspired design borrows its creative inspiration from models and systems in nature, that is, plant and animal parts that have been slowly tweaked for over 3.8 billion years. But that doesn't mean that nature's designs are perfect. In fact, that's what makes the process of engineering things based on natural models so difficult. You have to figure out how to pull the aces from the evolutionary discard pile. As professor Bob Full at U.C. Berkeley explained in our first phone conversation, that's also why scientists now use the term "bio-inspiration" rather than the more commonly known term "biomimicry." Biologists and engineers are not looking to simply mimic nature, because there are all kinds of dead ends and redundancies in natural systems that would be pointless to recreate in an optimized, man-made piece of technology. One of the examples he gave me is a kind of grasshopper that if you were to copy it, you would copy neurons that go to nothing, they don't connect to any muscles, and that's because during evolution the adults lost their ability to fly. The neurons going to the muscles are still there, but the muscles aren't there anymore. No need to copy that, right?

So what a biomimeticist does is look to nature to find plants & animals with remarkable performance abilities, and studies their adaptations for inspiration to design something new. For example, if you want to make a tiny robot that can fly, then look at the best fliers. If you want to design a blade that moves quickly through fluids, or an Olympic swimsuit that minimizes drag, then look to the most efficient swimmers. Now that's what I call "intelligent design!"

Watch the Bio-Inspiration: Nature as Muse television story report online.

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Our QUEST story on the science of anabolic steroids, how they affect the body, and the super-smart sleuths who are using science to catch the cheaters who abuse them, turned up some interesting information. For one thing, I was surprised to learn that according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse's fact sheet about anabolic-androgenic steroids, nearly 2 percent of 10th graders (both boys and girls) admitted to using steroids at some point. Now that may not seem like much, but when you think about the devastating consequences that steroids can have on the body, such as jaundice, kidney failure, and infertility, that's pretty alarming. One could even argue that there's a trickle-down effect when high-school athletes hear allegations of steroid abuse amongst professional athletes and see the athletes continue to pull down multimillion dollar contracts while winning accolades and national titles.

It's nice to know that there are scientists like Terry Sheehan and other high-tech chemists who have the high-tech tools like liquid chromatography and gas chromatography to identify the cheaters in the elite sporting competitions, like the upcoming Beijing Olympics and Tour de France. Clearly the temptation to cheat is great but as the case of Marion Jones has illustrated recently, the fall from grace if you're caught is swift and unremitting. At the end of June, Floyd Landis lost his last appeal to try and hang onto his 2006 Tour de France title. At the time, he vehemently denied that he used testosterone, instead claiming that he naturally has high levels of testosterone. This year's Tour de France has also been riven by positive doping results for several cyclists who tested positive for EPO, a banned substance that is naturally produced by the kidneys and stimulates the production of red blood cells in the bone marrow.

The other thing that I discovered when researching this QUEST story was how prevalent the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing illicit substances are amongst "average" people and amateur/semi-pro athletes. Granted, I can only speak anecdotally but there were quite a few personal trainers in the Bay Area with whom I spoke who mentioned how easily available anabolic steroids and increasingly, Human Growth Hormone (HGH), is in the gym-going and semi-pro cage-fighting and weightlifting community. Nowadays, it's not even necessarily the lure of big bucks or stardom that is enticing people to risk their health by abusing steroids, EPO, HGH or other substances. It seems that the quest for a youthful, fit appearance is enough of a motivator to make some people do so.


Watch the "Science Flexes Its Muscles" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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