In my neck of the woods, when you rhetorically quote some spec in the
100-999 nm range, you normally call it "submicron", whereas anything between 1 nm and 100 nm is "nanometer".Cheers
Phil Hobbs
TI degrading specs of existing parts without changing part numbers
Jun 03, 2026
Last reply: 2 months ago
120 Replies
The numbers that were cited were all for timing in nanoseconds and NOT for distance as in nanometers.
Incidentally, I've read through various papers that mention the 10 nsec number. The majority refer to a 10 nsec jitter and NOT a 10 nsec resolution. Also, the 10 nsec number seems to be at the extreme edge when graphs were supplied. My guess(tm) is that there might be some confusion between 10 nsec jitter and nsec resolution in some of the various papers. For example:
"Delay accuracy in bat sonar is related to the reciprocal of normalized echo bandwidth, or Q"
formatting link
See graphs in Fig 1, 2 and 3. "In jitter experiments, the bat's thresholds for detecting changes in delay were small fractions of a microsecond, which seemed impossible for the animal to achieve, so attention was then focused on what (presumably spectral) artifact other than change in delay itself must be the cue for the bat's performance (19, 20)."
I couldn't determine what the author meant by a "small fraction of a microsecond".
So that's a source of the 10ns stuff. The theory is that there was an instrumentation error, which is certainly plausible as no biological system is that fast, so biological researchers are far out of their domain for sure.
Joe
PS: The 100,000 rpm spinner in biology is "ATP Synthase", the enzyme system that converts between ADP and ATP in the mitochondria (in animals) and chloroplasts (in plants).
.
formatting link
JMG
Why do you say that no biological system can be that fast?
Anything less than a microsecond is astounding, inside the gooey head of a bat flapping its wings mid-air hunting a moth.
DNA helicase, the little gadget that splits our DNA when a cell divides, spins at about 10,000 RPM.
<Rotating biological motors were declared to be impossible, and rotating flagellum were known to be optical illusions.> Once.Google the <> above.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
It's only my best guess(tm). I didn't have much success at finding the oldest bat related citation that included a 10 nsec response time.
Sigh. I initially mentioned that there might have been some confusion between response time and jitter. Now, you add DNA replication to the confusion. Time for a sanity check.
What got my attention was the radical difference between the alleged
10 nsec nervous response time in bats, and the much slower nerve conduction times in humans. (I couldn't find specific numbers for bats)."Nerve conduction velocity"
formatting link
"The speed of nerve impulse transmission ranges from about 0.5 m/s to over 120 m/s".
I once watched a "cloud" of fruit bats emerging from the trees at dusk:
formatting link
I don't know how many there were, but my guess(tm) is in the thousands. The bats were not using their sonar for locating moths. Instead, they were looking for fruit and using their sonar to prevent mid-air collisions. I watched carefully and didn't see any collisions or bats falling from the sky. In order to do that, the muscles that move the bats wings need to quickly respond to brain signals and the muscles need to move quite fast. 10 nsec response time isn't going to work when the signals move at 0.5 m/s to over 120 m/s. A nerve impulse moves at perhaps 1 meter/sec (or 10 nanometers in 10 nanoseconds). A 10 nsec nerve impulse will have moved a microscopic distance.
To put it in perspective, a microsecond at the velocity of sound in air corresponds to 0.25mm (or 0.125mm for echolocation distance measurement).
[...]
The resolution would be the time-difference between two pulses and could possibly be resolved to 10nSec if the delay times were equal (or equalised). Prediction, based on existing trajectories, is a more likely explanation.
They measure what's easy to measure, an electrical impulse. Maybe that's not the information being sent.
Bats catch moths. Baseballs get hit.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
If nerve impulses travel 100 m/s and a bat's ears are 2 cm apart, the neural delay between ears is 200 us. And that's modulated by movement, heartbeats, things like that.
Maybe nature doesn't care about our opinions of how it's allowed to work.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
The electrical impulse isn't all that easy to measure, but at least it is visible, if you measure carefully enough.
You can hypothesise all sorts of magic connections, but until you spell out what one of them might be and how you'd measure it, you are just going in for hand-waving mysticism.
It all looks very as if you got caught being even stupider than usual, and are now trying to back off.
And half-wits have very silly ideas about what that implies.
Obviously it doesn't. That doesn't excuse you from picking up particularly half-baked ideas about how well it might be performing and posting them here.
True. Please note that the URL's I provided were not in response to your posting. I was responding to a question by snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net: Message-ID: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com "Bats are pretty good, but that seems a bit too good. Can you find that study?"
Methinks the mechanism might be similar to measuring the speed of electrons in wires. Energy transmission in a wire moves at near light speed. Electron drift velocity in wires (the movement of individual electrons) is about 1 mm/sec, which is much slower. I suspected that nerve impulse transmission in bats might be similar. However, my analogy breaks down because nerve impulse velocity can be 1 to 100 meters/sec, which is still much slower than near light speed (3*10^8 meters/sec).
"Nerve conduction velocity"
formatting link
"The speed of nerve impulse transmission ranges from about 0.5 m/s to over 120 m/s"
"Bats are surprisingly fast decision makers"
formatting link
"Sometimes we also see reaction times of only 20 milliseconds in bats, for instance in response to loud sounds, but that is a simple reflex reaction that does not require brain work".
20 msec response time isn't light speed it's a long way from 10 nsec. If the flying bat is on auto-pilot, then it's making 50 course corrections every second. Offhand, methinks that might be sufficient to avoid mid-air collisions with other bats. Even if 10 nsec resolution were possible, it would be overkill for a bat.
Caroline Palmer's Ph.D. thesis is on the timing in skilled piano playing. I've got a copy.
formatting link
Essentially the piano key has to get the hammer to hit the string within 10msec of the desired time to let the performer get the desired response from the listener. She's got a very well-instrumented piano that let her document that.
We probably do as well as bats in our own areas of interest.
It's not hard to use an internet search engine. You could take a class.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Most ideas are half-baked at first. But hostility to ideas guarantees that you will have none.
We need more goofy ideas; lots more. Then we need to sift out the few good ones, not club them all to death on first sight.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
I did not say that, although it was widely believed in the past.
Yes.
Yes. It's true that this was believed back in the day when no microscope of the day could see these little motors.
There were ways to determine the arrangement of atoms in crystals (X-ray diffraction), and it was possible to analyze such motors to the degree that they could be made to form good crystals. The motor assemblies are 10 to 15 nanometers across. Modern electron microscopes can see them directly as little blobs, but one cannot figure out the mechanism without using other kinds of data.
Joe
Not a bit. Maybe a complex chemical message travels very fast, and the electrical pulse is a system refresh that chases it.
That would be harder to detect, especially if one wasn't looking for it.
Have you read "Finding The Mother Tree"? It would be fun to instrument those fungi filaments in real time.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Some things happen locally, in the spinal cord or even closer to the action, without having to send messages to the head and back. The spinal cord is really just a part of the brain.
But some things, like hitting a baseball, must use an eye-brain-muscle path fast.
I surprise myself at how fast I can catch something that I drop. This morning I trapped an orange between the countertop and my belly, in a fraction of a second. Something decided that the belly would work better than a hand.
I once caught a hot soldering iron in mid-air. Just once. Now something tells my muscles to grab oranges but not soldering irons.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
We did find it after all.
These are directly measured values, taken in a wet lab.
Yes. There is a relevant visual example in birds, a murmuration of sparrows is famous. Starling murmuration creates incredible aerial display, Israel, from euronews:
formatting link
Hearing not required. I think the control law has been figured out for schooling fish, and it's quite simple.
Joe
The breakthrough was that somebody glued a flagellum down and saw the bacteria rotate.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Join the Discussion
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Didn't find your answer?
Ask the community — no account required