New Supersensitive Mic Can ID Gunfire Type and Location, Among Other Noises
A Dutch company called Microflown Technologies has developed a super-sensitive microphone that can identify where a gun is firing from, and even the make of the gun, just from the sound of gunfire. They call the technology acoustic vector sensing, and it can be used for not only gunfire, but all sorts of sounds. Screams, mortars, warplanes, motor vehicles, and anything else you can imagine that has a distinctive noise can be identified, and its position determined using the device and its measurements of the air disturbance created by the noise. On top of it all, as you can see from the photo above, it's smaller than a matchstick!
So how does it work? Well, the device itself holds two strips of platinum that are 10 micrometers wide and approximately 600 atoms thick (that's 200-nanometers for those of you who are rusty with your atom-to-nanometer conversions). The strips are heated up to 200 degrees Celsius, and then wait for a sound wave to pass through them. When one does, it cools down the strips in a certain way, and Microflown's proprietary software does what we assume are super-uber-complicated calculations to determine what the sound is and where it's coming from. It's even sensitive enough to pick out sounds from large crowds.
If deployed (multiple countries are testing it at the moment) it could be a valuable asset for troops defending posts in hostile territory.
