Pliny the Elder was one of the first to record it 2,000 years ago: termites are noisy eaters. Their loud chewing generates acoustic emissions that have been proposed to be a method of detecting cryptic attack. But a team from the Commonwealth worker termites might be able to detect vibration/acoustic signals generated by their foraging and use these signals to determine the size of the piece of...

Bees generate thoracic vibrations with their indirect flight muscles in various behavioural contexts. The main frequency component of non-flight vibrations, during which the wings are usually folded over the abdomen, is higher than that of thoracic vibrations that drive the wing movements for flight. So far, this has been concluded from an increase in natural frequency of the oscillating system...

Pupae of some insects produce sounds or vibrations, but the function of the sounds/vibrations has not been clarified in most cases. Recently, we found vibratory communication between pupae and larvae of a group-living beetle Trypoxylus dichotoma, which live in humus soil. The vibratory signals produced by pupae were shown to deter approaching larvae, thereby protecting themselves. In the presen...

While a plethora of studies have focused on the role of visual, chemical and near-field airborne signals in courtship of Drosophila fruit flies, the existence of substrate-borne vibrational signals has been almost completely overlooked. Here we describe substrate vibrations generated during courtship in three species of the D. melanogaster group, from the allegedly mute species D. suzukii, its ...

The Department of Mechanical Engineering is one of four departments within the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. The undergraduate educational experience emphasizes the application of a wide spectrum of engineering fundamentals. Care has been taken to ensure a balanced integration of theory, design and laboratory...

We demonstrate and discuss acoustic vibrations in spherical shell particles. The particles consist of 38-nm-thick gold shells, sandwiched between an inner silica core of 456 nm in diameter and an outer silica shell of 10 nm in thickness. Employing standard and asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS) ultrafast pump-probe experiments, we excite acoustic vibrations of the shells and detect the oscil...

Harvesting earthworms by a practice called 'worm grunting' is a widespread and profitable business in the southeastern USA. Although a variety of techniques are used, most involve rhythmically scraping a wooden stake driven into the ground, with a flat metal object. A common assumption is that vibrations cause the worms to surface, but this phenomenon has not been studied experimentally. We dem...

Self-excited vibrations are observed in many technical applications. Frictional contacts are often involved in the mechanism which generates vibrations. Reasons for the excitation mechanisms are decreasing friction characteristics depending on the sliding velocity, fluctuating normal loads or different geometrical effects. First, the mechanisms are explained using simple examples. The practical...

Our aim is to show the possibility of a "vibrational Fréedericksz's transition" in nematic liquid crystals (LCs) consisting of asymmetric molecules (in the absence of the reflectional symmetry for the director field). For this purpose we study the effects of the external high-frequency vibrations imposed on LCs by employing the rigorous two-timing asymptotic averaging method to the governing LC...

In order to effectively control vibration related problems, the development of a reliable vibration monitoring system and the proper assessment of attenuation characteristics of various vibrations are essential. Various ground vibrations caused by train loading, blasting, friction pile driving and hydraulic hammer compaction were measured using 3D geophones inside of the borehole as well as on ...