In dark skies around the world there unfolds a nightly battle between bats and the nocturnal insects upon which they feast. You’d have thought bats, equipped as they are with echolocation — in which ...

The ability of bats to understand and use sound has always been essential to their survival. Though these winged creatures have eyes, they rely heavily on echolocation, which means that they use the ...

Scientists have known for years that bats navigate by sonar. Like destroyers hunting down a submarine, they send out pulses of sound and steer by the echoes that bounce back from obstacles or prey. In ...

Dolphins do it. Big brown bats do it. And sometime soon, the Office of Naval Research hopes its researchers will be able to do it too. Echolocation, that is, and turning the processing of such signals ...

The Bat-Bot, developed by IST project CIRCE, can also wriggle its ears, a technique often used by bats to modulate the characteristics of the echo. CIRCE developed the Bat-Bot to closely mimic the ...

The standard version of the tale—the one told in textbooks and hundreds of scientific papers—goes like this. Millions of years ago, bats evolved a kind of sonar, allowing them to perceive the world by ...

Only 7% of LAist readers currently donate to fund our journalism. Help raise that number, so our nonprofit newsroom stays strong in the face of federal cuts. Donate now. Bats are among nature's ...