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Article

Title: Lateral Thinking

Author: Staff Article Type: Product Analysis
Source: The Economist, v381 n8506 p82(2) Publication Date: Dec 2, 2006
  ISSN: 0013-0613
URL of Publication: http://www.economist.com

Chang Liu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues have described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the first attempts to sense like a fish in order to learn how lateral line marine life activities occur. Fish can see and hear, but also depend on a series of flow sensors present along the sides of their bodies. The sensors are known as the lateral-line system. Dr. Liu's lateral line had 16 minute flow sensors instead of the 100 that a fish has, and the sensors included heated filaments that operated by recording how fast heat was lost. Output from sensors went to a computer programmed to try and work out what was occurring in a simplified version of the way that a fish brain would performance such an analysis. Other described tests include those for the ability to locate the small pulsing movement created by a vibrating ball and whether an array could detect vortices left in the wake of escaping prey. Dr. Liu proved that the artificial lateral line system could work out the general direction of the source and could identify the pattern of the vortices. Dr. Liu is now working on a sensor design that works more like the sense cells in a real lateral line. Among the many possible applications for lateral lines, the most obvious would be for manned and unmanned submarines.

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