Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
briandmyers · 4625 days ago · link · · parent · post: Charcoal beatles can sense heat from 130km away
New Scientist is usually reputable, but this seems hard to fathom. How would such an IR sense distinguish between such an extremely faint IR signal (over 100 km away!) and all the other environmental IR sources around that are much closer? For example, surely these beetles would be side-tracked by the IR (heat) given off by power lines and transformers, long before they travelled a hundred kilometers? It just doesn't seem likely that they are following an IR signal over that kind of a distance.
The article implies that they assumed the beetles detected the IR of a fire, and then the researchers calculated the heat signature of the fire, and from that, how sensitive the sensors would have to be - IF in fact those beetles came from that far away, AND they used only IR to find the fire. It doesn't say that they know either of those assumptions are correct. They mention "stochastic resonance" - but the other IR 'noise' in their environment is not at all random, which would be required for that mechanism to improve their sensor accuracy. This is an awful lot of speculation, about an event that occurred in 1925. Colour me skeptical.