Cold Fusion Race: NASA, MIT, DARPA and CERN

Four months ago, Andrea Rossi demonstrated what he claims was a one-megawatt "Energy Catalyser" -- or E-Cat -- which produces power by cold fusion. This technology, also known as Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), had been consigned to the deepest cellar of fringe science.

Now it's hammering on the cellar door, and Nasa, MIT, Darpa and Cern are among those peering through the keyhole, wondering if it should be allowed back in with respectable science. As part of Wired.co.uk's continued coverage of progress in this controversial field, we have investigated recent developments.

Nasa

Nasa has started giving very mixed signals on cold fusion. After years of silence on the issue, a piece appeared on its website stating that LENR tests carried out at Nasa's Glenn Research Centre "consistently show evidence of anomalous heat," indicating that cold fusion was taking place. There is also a link to a paper given at an LENR Workshop held at Glenn in September 2011. However, when questioned, a Nasa spokesman stated out that there was no Nasa cold fusion project, and no budget for it. The work appears to be carried out on the side by interested Nasa scientists.

Even more dramatically, on 16 January a video appeared on Nasa's Technology Gateway site, essentially a marketplace for commercialising technology developed at Nasa. This featured Dr Joseph Zawodny talking about his "Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate & Sustain LENR." In this Dr Zawodny says the technology has the potential to provide home heating and electricity, cleanly and without nuclear waste.

The video release was quickly followed by a long post on Dr Zawodny's blog explaining that he was expressing his own views on LENR and not those of Nasa. In response to the clamour from Rossi's fans, he stressed that he was not yet convinced the E-Cat works: "I am unaware of any clear and convincing demonstrations of any viable commercial device producing useful amounts of net energy."

Steven Krivit of New Energy Times used the Freedom of Information Act to get details of more Nasa LENR presentations and clearly there's quite a fan club there.

Cern

Meanwhile Cern is holding a colloquium on LENR, scheduled for 22 March. This will be available live via webcast, and will be given by Francesco Celani from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Cern is of course a major bastion of mainstream science; a search of Cern's site shows just eight papers on cold fusion compared to over 8,000 on conventional hot fusion. The colloquium seems like inviting a heretic to preach in a cathedral. A recent presentation shows that Celani is a strong advocate for LENR, suggesting that the challenge now is understanding exactly how it works. (He also states that Rossi's claims, though not impossible, need independent verification)

MIT

MIT, which played a key role in discrediting the original cold fusion studies in 1989, might also be shifting its position a little. This January for the first time there was a short course called "Cold Fusion 101." This was taught by Peter Hagelstein, who has been working on LENR for many years. According to a report in Cold Fusion Times, the course included a working demonstration of LENR showing measurable excess of heat.

Darpa

Darpa, the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been quietly pursuing LENR for some years. Its budget plans for next year, released earlier this month, listed some significant achievements: "Continued quantification of material parameters that control degree of increase in excess heat generation and life expectancy of power cells in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy. Established ability to extend active heat generation time from minutes to 2.5 days for pressure-activated power cells."

However, when contacted Darpa were unable to comment on this work.

But what of Andrea Rossi and Defkalion?

Andrea Rossi

In the meantime, Andrea Rossi has been playing the tightrope walker, always appearing to be a whisker from tumbling into the abyss. The University of Bologna terminated an agreement to explore the E-Cat after he failed to make a progress payment; but a later statement indicated it was still keen to work with him.

As New Energy Times noted, the original one-megawatt device which was supposedly sold to a mystery customer months ago has not moved. When he has free heating, why is his Bologna factory so cold that Rossi needs an overcoat in one video? Rossi responded in terms of the size of the space and the available E-Cats.

More digging by New Energy Times suggested that Rossi was not in fact working in partnership with National Instruments as he has claimed. However, a later statement by the company confirmed that Rossi's account was substantially correct, even if he was not an actual customer.

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If Rossi has not produced anything tangible in the last few months, he has certainly come up with plenty of vapourware. The entire E-Cat design has been revamped and upgraded. Instead of costing thousands, the price of a ten-kilowatt domestic E-Cat will now be between 500-700 Euros. It will be the size of a desktop PC and able to directly replace existing boilers, and will be refuelled by changing a simple cartridge every six months. In a year or two's time, Rossi says it will also be possible to generate electricity from an E-Cat.

Rossi claims that almost 100,000 people have signed up to express interest in ordering an E-Cat: "You will be put in the waiting list and in Autumn you will receive a precise offer: at that point you will be free to cancel the order or confirm it. The deliveries could start within one year (could, not will)."

Rossi also claims that he will have a completely robotised production line which will churn out a million E-Cats in the first year alone. However, the very existence of the factory remains unproven, along with his mystery customer, mystery business partners, mystery suppliers and the mystery investors who now apparently control his company, Leonardo Corp.

Perhaps Rossi's "precise offer" might ask customers to make a deposit. It would take a very trusting soul to hand over cash without the sort of evidence that Zawodny and Celani seek.

Defkalion Green

While Rossi has declined to give any further public or scientific demonstrations, saying that he wants to leave it to the market, his rival Defkalion Green technologies has seemingly taken a much bolder approach. It has invited independent testers to carry out trials on its Hyperion LENR reactor.

We know that seven independent test groups will be involved, but there things get a bit murky. Non-disclosure agreements are in place, and it is not certain what information will be released or when: if the Very Big Oil Corporation finds the Hyperion works, it might prefer to talk to Defkalion itself rather than publicising it. (And big oil might just be interested -- the indefatigable Steven Krivit found that Royal Dutch Shell has started looking for opportunities to work with LENR experts.)

What we do know is that according to the test protocol, one live and one inert Hyperion will be tested side by side for 48 hours, with the inert machine acting as a control. Then the active component will be removed from the live and placed in the inert one, and the test will be run again, so the complete test will take a minimum of four days.

Defkalion has confirmed that the tests will start on 24 February. According to Sterling Allan of Peswiki, who visited Defkalion a couple of weeks ago, the first round of tests will be carried out by a Greek government organisation. Defkalion has not released anything about the identity of the testers.

So perhaps the Greek government will soon announce a fantastic new energy source, one that will solve the country's economic problems at a stroke and provide the world with unlimited cheap energy. No doubt they would love to do that… and the rest of us will also await test results with interest.

Clouds Closer to Earth

Chicken Licken was right, the sky really is falling. Nasa satellite data has shown that the Earth's cloud tops have been lowering over the last decade.

 Cloud-top height fell one percent on average between March 2000 and February 2010, according to measurements from the multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer mounted on Nasa's Terra satellite. That one percent means a reduction of 30 to 40 metres in the average maximum height of clouds, during the 00s.

While the short record means it's difficult to draw any strong conclusions from the data, it does hint towards a longer-term trend. Roger Davies, the lead researcher on the project, warns that it's something that should be monitored in the coming decades to determine how significant it is for global temperatures.

If there is indeed a consistent reduction in cloud height, and this isn't just natural variability, then Earth would begin cooling to space more efficiently, reducing the surface temperatures and slowing the effects of climate change. 

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"We don't know exactly what causes the cloud heights to lower," says Davies. "But it must be due to a change in the circulation patterns that give rise to cloud formation at high altitude." The Terra spacecraft, which launched in 1999 and records three-dimensional images of clouds around the globe, will continue gathering data in the coming years.

Hubble Telescope Spots Exoplanet Made of Water

GJ 1214b, a planet some 40 light-years from Earth, is a water world. It's almost entirely made of liquid, has an estimated temperature of 230C and is enshrouded by a steamy atmosphere.

"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like hot ice or superfluid water: substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," explains Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

It's classified as a super-Earth, as the planet is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits its star every 38 hours at a distance of just two million kilometres, resulting in those super-hot temperatures.

The planet was first discovered in 2009, by the ground-based MEarth Project. The next year, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) measured the exoplanet's atmosphere, and found that it could be composed mainly of water.

But those observations could also be explained if the planet just had a thick, hazy atmosphere. So, the team waited for GJ 1214b to cross in front of its host star (a red dwarf). When that happens, the star's light is filtered through the planet's atmosphere, giving hints to the mix of gases it contains.

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"We're using Hubble to measure the infrared colour of sunset on this world," explained the CfA team leader.

The team used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to watch the planet's transit, and found the spectrum of GJ 1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths. That's consistent with a dense atmosphere of water vapour, suggesting the planet is covered by steam -- not haze.

Because the team knows the planet's mass and size, they can calculate the density. It comes out at about about two grams per cubic centimetre -- seeing as water has a density of one gram per cubic centimetre, and the Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre, GJ 1214b has much more water and much less rock than our so-called "Blue Marble".

The liquid planet has been flagged as a "prime candidate" for study by Hubble's successor: the James Webb Space Telescope, when it launches around 2018.

Solid Buckyballs in Space Found by Spitzer Telescope

After finding gaseous clouds of buckyballs in space last year, astronomers have now discovered the carbon balls in a solid form, around a pair of stars some 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Buckyballs are microscopic spheres, where 60 carbon atoms are arranged -- with alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons -- into a football-like pattern. The unusual structure makes them incredibly strong, and ideal candidates for things like superconducting materials, medicines, water purification and armour.

They got their name because of their resemblance to the geodesic domes of the architect Buckminster Fuller.

So far, they've only been found in gas form in space. In 2010, astronomers using the Spitzer space telescope found the balls in a planetary nebula called Tc 1.

But with this latest discovery, again using data from Nasa's Spitzer space telescope, astronomers found particles consisting of stacked buckyballs. They had stacked together like oranges in a crate to form a solid shape.

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"The particles we detected are minuscule, far smaller than the width of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs," said the paper's lead author Nye Evans of Keele University in England.

The research team was able to identify the solid form of buckyballs in the Spitzer data because they emit light in a unique way that differs from the gaseous form. In all, the team detected enough solid buckyballs to fill the equivalent in volume to 10,000 Mount Everests.

"This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed," said Mike Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "They may be an important form of carbon, an essential building block for life, throughout the cosmos."

New Blood Types Discovered

You probably know your blood type: A, B, AB or O. You may even know if you're Rhesus positive or negative. But how about the Langereis blood type? Or the Junior blood type? Positive or negative? Most people have never even heard of these.

Yet this knowledge could be "a matter of life and death," says University of Vermont biologist Bryan Ballif.

While blood transfusion problems due to Langereis and Junior blood types are rare worldwide, several ethnic populations are at risk, Ballif notes. "More than 50,000 Japanese are thought to be Junior negative and may encounter blood transfusion problems or mother-fetus incompatibility," he writes.

 But the molecular basis of these two blood types has remained a mystery — until now.

In the February issue of Nature Genetics, Ballif and his colleagues report on their discovery of two proteins on red blood cells responsible for these lesser-known blood types.

Ballif identified the two molecules as specialized transport proteins named ABCB6 and ABCG2.

"Only 30 proteins have previously been identified as responsible for a basic blood type," Ballif notes, "but the count now reaches 32."

The last new blood group proteins to be discovered were nearly a decade ago, Ballif says, "so it's pretty remarkable to have two identified this year."

Both of the newly identified proteins are also associated with anticancer drug resistance, so the findings may also have implications for improved treatment of breast and other cancers.

As part of the international effort, Ballif, assistant professor in UVM's biology department, used a mass spectrometer funded by the Vermont Genetics Network. With this machine, he analyzed proteins purified by his longtime collaborator, Lionel Arnaud at the French National Institute for Blood Transfusion in Paris, France.

Ballif and Arnaud, in turn, relied on antibodies to Langereis and Junior blood antigens developed by Yoshihiko Tani at the Japanese Red Cross Osaka Blood Center and Toru Miyasaki at the Japanese Red Cross Hokkaido Blood Center.

After the protein identification in Vermont, the work returned to France. There Arnaud and his team conducted cellular and genetic tests confirming that these proteins were responsible for the Langereis and Junior blood types. "He was able to test the gene sequence," Ballif says, "and, sure enough, we found mutations in this particular gene for all the people in our sample who have these problems."

Beyond the ABO blood type and the Rhesus (Rh) blood type, the International Blood Transfusion Society recognizes twenty-eight additional blood types with names like Duffy, Kidd, Diego and Lutheran. But Langereis and Junior have not been on this list. Although the antigens for the Junior and Langereis (or Lan) blood types were identified decades ago in pregnant women having difficulties carrying babies with incompatible blood types, the genetic basis of these antigens has been unknown until now.

Therefore, "very few people learn if they are Langereis or Junior positive or negative," Ballif says.

"Transfusion support of individuals with an anti-Lan antibody is highly challenging," the research team wrote in Nature Genetics, "partly because of the scarcity of compatible blood donors but mainly because of the lack of reliable reagents for blood screening." And Junior-negative blood donors are extremely rare too. That may soon change.

With the findings from this new research, health care professionals will now be able to more rapidly and confidently screen for these novel blood group proteins, Ballif wrote in a recent news article. "This will leave them better prepared to have blood ready when blood transfusions or other tissue donations are required," he notes.

"Now that we know these proteins, it will become a routine test," he says.

This science may be especially important to organ transplant patients. "As we get better and better at transplants, we do everything we can to make a good match," Ballif says. But sometimes a tissue or organ transplant, that looked like a good match, doesn't work — and the donated tissue is rejected, which can lead to many problems or death.

"We don't always know why there is rejection," Ballif says, "but it may have to do with these proteins."

The rejection of donated tissue or blood is caused by the way the immune system distinguishes self from not-self. "If our own blood cells don't have these proteins, they're not familiar to our immune system," Ballif says, so the new blood doesn't "look like self" to the complex cellular defenses of the immune system. "They'll develop antibodies against it," Ballif says, and try to kill off the perceived invaders. In short, the body starts to attack itself.

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"Then you may be out of luck," says Ballif, who notes that in addition to certain Japanese populations, European Gypsies are also at higher risk for not carrying the Langereis and Junior blood type proteins.

"There are people in the United States who have these challenges too," he says, "but it's more rare."

Ballif and his international colleagues are not done with their search. "We're following up on more unknown blood types," he says. "There are probably on the order of 10 to 15 more of these unknown blood type systems — where we know there is a problem but we don't know what the protein is that is causing the problem."

Although these other blood systems are very rare, "if you're that one individual, and you need a transfusion," Ballif says, "there's nothing more important for you to know."

No Men Extinction, We Will Always Be Here!

Over the last few decades, scientists and journalists have speculated that the end of man—men, that is—was nigh. The biological reason for this possibility is the ever-shrinking Y chromosome: 300-200 million years ago, the Y, like females’ X chromosome, had hundreds of genes, but it now contains less than 80, 19 of which code for specifically male traits such as sperm production. 

 This remarkable contraction set people’s imaginations spinning, especially after an opinion piece said in Nature 10 years ago that the Y chromosome might disappear, as it already has in voles, in 10 million years.

A Nature paper published this week, however, may indicate that the Y is sticking around. Biologists at the Whitehead Institute have compared the Y chromosome of rhesus monkeys with the human Y chromosome, and they’ve found that the two have the same number but one of key male-specific genes. This implies that the human Y chromosome’s shrinkage, at least when it comes to key genes, stopped at least around 25 million years ago, when the common ancestor of humans and rhesus monkeys was alive. 

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The team says that this 25 million years of stasis indicates that the Y’s days of sloughing genes are over, that the genes it carries now are the essential ones and cannot be removed without seriously impacting reproductive function, while the genes lost in the past were expendable.

It’s hard to say that evolution of the Y chromosome has categorically ceased, though—evolution doesn’t necessarily follow a straight line. And it’s worth remembering that we had males before we had the Y chromosome: the male genes, at that time, were just spread across the genome. Even if more shrinking events eventually do send the Y the way of the leisure suit, it doesn’t mean that males will follow suit.

Huge Avalanche near Mars's North Pole

A Nasa spacecraft has captured an avalanche of fine ice and dust thundering over a cliff near Mars's north pole. 

It's not the first avalanche captured by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - Nasa first detected the phenomenon in 2008, believed to be caused by a thin 'crust' of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) which forms during the Martian winter. 

 Ice and dust cascade over a Martian cliff: The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the avalanche near Mars's north pole

The HiRISE high resolution camera took the amazing photograph at 85 degrees north on the planet.

The HiRISE camera is one of several hi-tech instruments on board Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's the largest camera ever carried into deep space.

Nasa's ground team says that the events are detectable by a cloud of fine material that erupts when avalanches collapse down slopes on the planet.

Some avalanches on Mars are caused by meteorite impacts, but others are thought to be the result of 'seasons' on the planet, which has winters, just like Earth.
Planetary scientist Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona, who first noticed the avalanches in photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter said, 'It's great to see something so dynamic on Mars. A lot of what we see there hasn't changed for millions of years.'


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Fine ice and dust cascades over a martian polar cliff in March 2010 in another picture captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera.

Ancient Ocean on Mars

The European Space Agency's Mars Express has returned compelling evidence that the red planet once hosted an enormous ocean in its northern plains. The probe's radar detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor, within areas that have been suspected to be shorelines.

Jérémie Mouginot from the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), the University of California in Irvine, and colleagues analysed more than two years of data from Mars Express' Marsis (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) radar.

The radar can penetrate deep into the planet's ground, and reveal the first 60 to 80 metres of the planet's subsurface. At these depths, the team found that the northern plains are covered in low-density material.

"We interpret these as sedimentary deposits, maybe ice-rich," says Mouginot. "It is a strong new indication that there was once an ocean here."

The notion of water on Mars and big ideas of oceans in the planet's ancient history are nothing new. But this research provides some of the best evidence yet that there were once large bodies of liquid water on Mars, and it is further proof that water played a role in martian geological history.

"Previous Mars Express results about water on Mars came from the study of images and mineralogical data, as well as atmospheric measurements," said Olivier Witasse, a Mars Express project scientist at the European Space Agency.

This data supports a proposed theory where Mars has had two oceans in its lifetime. One four billion years ago when warmer conditions prevailed, and another three billion years go when subsurface ice melted following a large impact.

This later ocean would have been very temporary. It would only have lasted about a million years or less, Mouginot estimates, and then the water would have either frozen back in place or turned into vapour and lifted gradually into the planet's weak atmosphere.

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"I don't think it could have stayed as an ocean long enough for life to form," Mouginot says.

A recent study from Imperial College London doesn't offer much good news for martian life-hunters, either. Soil analysis at the site of Nasa's Phoenix mission suggest that surface of Mars has dry as a bone for hundreds of millions of years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface

Cool Software Adds Realistically 3D Objects to Pictures

A simple programming tool can build a model of a scene in a two-dimensional photograph and insert a realistic-looking synthetic object into it. Unlike other augmented reality programs, it doesn’t use any tags, props or laser scanners to model a scene’s geometry — it just uses a small number of markers and accounts for lighting and depth. The result is an augmented scene with proper perspective, which looks so realistic that testers could not distinguish between an original photo and a modified one.

With just a single image and some annotation by a user, the program creates a physical model of a scene, as demonstrated in the video below.

Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth and Derek Hoiem at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a new image composition algorithm to generate an accurate lighting model. It uses geometry to build upon existing light-estimation methods, and it can work with any type of rendering software, the researchers explain. It works by breaking down the scene’s geometry and depth of field, and then determining how much of the scene’s overall illumination is a result of reflection (albedo) and how much directly emanates from light fixtures. This provides light parameters that can be transposed onto an inserted object. The team has developed algorithms for interior lights and for external light sources, typically light shafts from the sun.

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To test how well it worked, Karsch et al. showed some study participants a series of images — some with no synthetic objects, and some with synthetic objects inserted in one of three ways: either an existing light-derivation method, their new algorithm with a simplified lighting model, and their new algorithm in all its light-modeling glory. The subjects had computer science or graphics backgrounds.

“Surprisingly, subjects tended to do a worse job identifying the real picture as the study progressed,” the authors explain in a paper describing their method. “These results indicate that people are not good at differentiating real from synthetic photographs, and that our method is state of the art.”

The method could be used for video games, movies, home decorating or other uses. The work is slated to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011.

Future Astronauts Will be Able to Perform Surgery on Each Other

Astronauts traveling to Mars or other distant destinations will face all kinds of medical problems, but rocket science isn’t surgery. And vice versa. A new augmented reality system could help astronauts take care of each other, overlaying computer graphics over a real patient to guide diagnoses or even surgery. It could even improve telemedicine in developing countries or remote spots.

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For now, the Computer Assisted Medical Diagnosis and Surgery System, CAMDASS, only works with ultrasound, which is already available on the International Space Station. But the goal is to use it for any biomedical procedures future astronauts might need, according to the European Space Agency.

CAMDASS users don a 3-D display headcam, which includes an infrared camera to track the ultrasound device. Markers placed on a patient’s body denote sites of interest, and the system recognizes the patient and calibrates the display according to the CAMDASS wearer’s vision, an ESA news release explains. The headset displays little floating cue cards in the wearer’s field of vision, which match up with the markers on the real patient. Aligning the markers helps the user position the ultrasound probe, or whatever other device is needed. Then reference images show what the CAMDASS wearer should be seeing.

The ESA tested a prototype of this device with medical and nursing students, paramedics and Belgian Red Cross workers at Saint-Pierre University Hospital in Brussels. The CAMDASS testers could perform a “reasonably difficult” ultrasound procedure without any other help, the space agency said.

Augmented reality can be pretty fun to play with, but the practical applications of a real-life informational overlay are limitless. This is one reason why DARPA wants AR contact lenses that would require no bulky headgear. We've even seen an AR concept in which a would-be home mechanic can learn how to repair a car.

Similarly, this ESA device could be useful long before anyone takes it to Mars. It could help improve diagnostics in developing countries, for instance, or in remote locations like Antarctic research stations. Workers there have had to complete their fair share of self-diagnostics. The ESA now wants to conduct further tests.

A Non-Surgical Procedure can Heal Nerves Quickly

A simple new procedure could repair severed sciatic nerves in minutes and have the patient walking within days rather than months.

This relatively inexpensive treatment could dramatically increase the speed of post-surgery recovery while creating greater potential for full function of the injured area

.

University of Texas scientists studied invertebrates’ ability to regenerate nerve axons much more quickly than mammals and mimicked the process.

Through operating on paralyzed rats, a UT research team discovered that preventing the body’s self-healing process keeps the nerve ends from sealing themselves off, making it more difficult to later reattach them.

UT professor George Bittner, who led the study, found that keeping the injured area calcium-free prevents the self-repairing process. Doing this makes for an easier surgery, in which he then begins the self-healing process himself by injecting a calcium-rich solution.

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Through this encouraging of the nerves to reattach themselves, Bittner springs the beginning of a healthy healing process.

Bittner has successfully performed this procedure on 200 rats, making a promising prospect for humans with damaged nerves.

Have tolerance for a little light surgery? Watch the amazing video of paralyzed rats walking again here.

You Will Never Guess How this Monkey Communicates

The Philippine tarsier is a tiny primate with a seriously high voice. The saucer-eyed mammal can let out (and listen to) squeaks and squeals at such a high frequency that it effectively gives the mammal a private communication channel.

A team of researchers, led by Marissa Ramsier of Humboldt State University in California, found that the tiny tarsier can hear and emit sounds in the ultrasound range -- that's above 20kHz.

Most humans can't hear in that range, and a dog whistle is pitched to be just inside ultrasound, somewhere between 22 and 23 kHz. A handful of mammals can make sounds in this range -- some whales, domestic cats and a few species of bats -- but few can match the Philippine tarsier.

When issuing warnings or ferreting out crickets for a nighttime snack, the nocturnal faunivores (that's a mix of carnivore and insectivore) can vocalise in a range around 70 kHz, and pick up frequencies above 90 kHz.

"Such values are among the highest recorded for any terrestrial mammal," the researchers note in their paper, which was published in Biology Letters.

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To get this reading, they captured six of the docile creatures and placed them inside custom-built sound chambers to test their sensitivity to high-pitched sounds. Then, they recorded another 35 specimens in the wild to measure the frequency of the tarsier's chatter.

In the paper, the researchers explain that, "ultrasonic alarm calls can be advantageous to both the signaller and receiver as they are potentially difficult for predators to detect and localise." Being able to hear in high ranges might let them eavesdrop on noises made by moths, crickets and birds.

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