TV, radio, GPS, cell phones, wireless Internet and other
electronics all use different radio waves to receive and send
information. Now scientists at MIT have created a tiny antenna
capable of receiving any radio signal, based on the human ear.
The new universal radio could lead to better reception and a new
class of electronics that can pick up any radio frequency. "The
human ear is a very good spectrum analyzer," said Rahul
Sarpekhkar, a professor at MIT who co-authored the paper in the
June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. "We
copied some of the tricks the ear does, and mapped those onto
electronics." The unique architecture of the human ear allows it
to detect a wide range of sounds. A spiral with thousands of
tiny hairs, called cilia, of different sizes help the ear to
separate out each frequency, from 100 hertz up to 10,000 hertz,
and transmit that information to the brain. To detect
electromagnetic waves instead of pressure waves the MIT
scientists used circuits, in place of cilia. St