I almost forgot to share this week’s sciku! It was inspired by researchers at Stanford and TU/e who have been studying how hummingbirds hum.

If you’ve spent any time watching hummingbirds, you might already know they answer: they don’t fly like regular birds that apply aerodynamic force to the undersides of their wings with every down-stroke. Their wings move back and forth horizontally, letting letting them hover like a helicopter. This motion creates pressure fields on both the up and the down strokes, and those fields of compacted air oscillate back and forth at 40 hertz, creating their iconic and soothing hum, rather than an annoying buzz.

What was interesting about this story, though, was the great pains the researchers went through to record the hummingbirds and then process the data. Over the course of four days, they filmed with 15 high speed cameras, over two thousand microphones in a “sound camera” array, and recorded the movement of air with a series of pressure plates. Then it took THREE YEARS of machine learning AI to process and synchronize the massive amount of data that was collected.

There’s a cliched joke about scientists wasting time and grant money studying whale burps or the way cheese melts on toast. But it’s often the challenges that come with solving any problem—even a mundane problem—that lead to new advances. In this case, the sound camera technology that was developed will be used to decrease the background noise created by drones and fans, and ultimately could make all of our appliances quieter. Wouldn’t that be nice?

hummingbird
heavy in the field
of sound