A new study found that spider silk has the potential to enhance hearing aid microphones' sensitivity and ability to process low-frequency sounds. (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1710559114.) Spiders hear by using their hairs to detect the velocity of air. To see if they could harness these capabilities to improve the quality of microphones, researchers from Binghamton University coated spider silk with gold to add electrical conductivity to the fiber, and incorporated it into a microphone. They discovered that nanodimensional spider silk captures fluctuating airflow with maximum physical efficiency from 1 Hz to 50 kHz.
Ron Miles, a mechanical engineer at Binghamton University who created the microphone, said the resulting microphone consists of super-thin fibers that move with the air in a sound field. "The fibers are driven by viscous forces in air, like those that cause tiny dust particles to float around in a slight breeze," he said. The researchers said adding spider silk to microphones is a miniature, directional, broadband, passive, low-cost approach to detecting airflow over a frequency bandwidth that spans the full range of human hearing.
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