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This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Bats rely on echolocation to navigate the night skies and to chase down and capture even

erratically moving prey. But even more impressive than their aerial acrobatics are the mental

gymnastics bats must be performing to translate the time it takes for their echo calls to return

into a distance to their target.

Now those pings would not normally be audible to our human ears, but we slowed them down so you

can hear how a bat closes in on an object. Now, a new study shows that to get a leg up or a wing

up on the necessary navigational calculations, bats have an innate sense of the speed of sound.

The work appears in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It has always been assumed that bats use the speed of sound in order to assess distance,

so basically their brains measure time and then if they know the speed of sound,

they can assess the distance to the target using it.

EOC of L, of Tel Aviv University.

But this assumes that they know the speed of sound and this was never actually tested.

That's where the helium comes in.

One of the things we did is we took pups that were actually never exposed to a regular

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