MIT unveils bionic ear

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just announced the creation of a new radio frequency receiver capable of picking up Internet, mobile phone, television and old-fashioned radio signals. Dubbed the 'Radio Frequency Cochlea' and modeled after the human inner-ear, the device holds the promise for a universal radio in the not-so-distant future.

Associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science Rahul Sarpeshkar and his sidekick Soumyajit Mandal (one of his graduate students) are the brains behind the discovery. The dynamic duo claims the chip is faster and operates at a much lower power than any other radio frequency receiver designed before.

Quoted in an MIT news article, Sarpeshkar marveled at the frequency sequencing capability of the human ear:

"The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's going on in the sound spectrum. The more I started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels."

A detailed report on the new technology will be published in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. Or, if that sounds like a real snoozer of a read, you could just wait until the receiver enables a whole new generation of really cool gadgets.