Left-right tympanal size asymmetry in the parasitoid fly .

is a parasitoid fly notable for its impressive hearing abilities relative to its small size. Here, we use it as a model organism to investigate if minor size differences in paired sensory organs may be beneficial or neutral to an organism's perception abilities. We took high-resolution images of tympanal organs from 21 specimens and found a statistically significant surface area asymmetry (up to 6.

Microfluidic-based systems for the management of diabetes.

Diabetes currently affects approximately 500 million people worldwide and is one of the most common causes of mortality in the United States. To diagnose and monitor diabetes, finger-prick blood glucose testing has long been used as the clinical gold standard. For diabetes treatment, insulin is typically delivered subcutaneously through cannula-based syringes, pens, or pumps in almost all type 1 diabetic (T1D) patients and some type 2 diabetic (T2D) patients.

Reconsidering tympanal-acoustic interactions leads to an improved model of auditory acuity in a parasitoid fly.

Although most binaural organisms locate sound sources using neurological structures to amplify the sounds they hear, some animals use mechanically coupled hearing organs instead. One of these animals, the parasitoid fly(), has astoundingly accurate sound localization abilities. It can locate objects in the azimuthal plane with a precision of 2°, equal to that of humans, despite an intertympanal distance of only 0.

Frequency-specific, valveless flow control in insect-mimetic microfluidic devices.

Inexpensive, portable lab-on-a-chip devices would revolutionize fields like environmental monitoring and global health, but current microfluidic chips are tethered to extensive off-chip hardware. Insects, however, are self-contained and expertly manipulate fluids at the microscale using largely unexplored methods. We fabricated a series of microfluidic devices that mimic key features of insect respiratory kinematics observed by synchrotron-radiation imaging, including the collapse of portions of multiple respiratory tracts in response to a single fluctuating pressure signal.

Effects of coral colony morphology on turbulent flow dynamics.

Local flow dynamics play a central role in physiological processes like respiration and nutrient uptake in coral reefs. Despite the importance of corals as hosts to a quarter of all marine life, and the pervasive threats facing corals, characterizing the hydrodynamics between the branches of scleractinian corals has remained a significant challenge. Here, we investigate the effects of colony branch density and surface structure on the local flow field using three-dimensional immersed boundary, large-eddy simulations for four different colony geometries under unidirectional oncoming flow conditions.

Selective pumping in a network: insect-style microscale flow transport.

A new paradigm for selective pumping of fluids in a complex network of channels in the microscale flow regime is presented. The model is inspired by internal flow distributions produced by the rhythmic wall contractions observed in many insect tracheal networks. The approach presented here is a natural extension of previous two-dimensional modeling of insect-inspired microscale flow transport in a single channel, and aims to manipulate fluids efficiently in microscale networks without the use of any mechanical valves.