While doing some research into neural coding, I came across a reference for a paper that claims bats have nanosecond acuity with echolocation.
Say what? Nanosecond? Apparently so. I can’t really tell how they came to this conclusion by the abstract, but it’s been reliably cited in another paper. I’m definitely going to check this out at the library soon. Exactly how a bat, or indeed any kind of animal, can tell distinguish signals to an accuracy of nanoseconds (those are billionths of a second) is beyond me; simple neurons can only transmit with millisecond accuracy. Just when you start getting blase about biology and how eyes can detect single photons, another amazing thing pops up.
mssv 