cricket fly abdominal hearing organs timing cricket tracking

A fly can locate a singing cricket with ears on its abdomen

A female cricket fly finds singing male crickets using two hearing organs on its abdomen. The two ears can respond only about 50 billionths of a second apart, yet that tiny difference is enough to tell the fly which direction to move before it attacks the cricket as a parasite.

9,000-year-old Chinese flutes were made to play specific notes

Bone flutes from the ancient Chinese settlement of Jiahu were made carefully enough to produce particular musical notes. Their makers therefore appear to have understood how to shape an instrument to control its sound.

Cretan place-names helped decode Linear B

Michael Ventris noticed that some sign combinations appeared only on tablets from Crete. He thought they might be Cretan place-names, and that clue helped him identify Linear B as a script for writing Greek, against the prevailing view that it was not Greek.

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cricket fly abdominal hearing organs timing cricket tracking

A fly can locate a singing cricket with ears on its abdomen

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