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Protein found in robins’ eyes has all the hallmarks of a magnetoreceptor
- neatze 5y agoBirds abilities to navigate is outright insane, for example albatross can travel ten thousands of miles, I believe it is only bird that circumvents earth, I am not convinced that magnetoreceptor is the only answer to how birds able to navigate, if not mistaken in WWII researchers glued magnets to pigeons head, it did not affect there's abilities to navigate.
- firethief 5y agoThat would throw off a simple compass, but if they can see relative strengths of magnetic fields it would be more like a source of glare than a blindfold
- neatze 5y agoIn analogy, it would be similar to pointing bright flash light directly into the eyes, I guess.
- nicwilson 5y agoI think you mean something other than circumvents, circumnavigates? Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern
- selimthegrim 5y agoI seem to remember reading the exact same papers 10 years ago down to the quantum radical based theory. Has this field really advanced?
- whymauri 5y agoNo, not really. https://elifesciences.org/articles/17210 https://elifesciences.org/articles/17210 Oh wow, didn't even realize Anikeeva and Jasanoff had written on this, too: https://elifesciences.org/articles/19569 https://elifesciences.org/articles/19569 Just too much snake oil in this field -- in top Nature journals, nonetheless. It's funny, when I was an undergrad I took a research idea to Alan Jasanoff and he rejected it with similarly simple back-of-the-envelope math. Guess he has a knack for sniffing out BS.
- mxmilkiib 5y agohttps://m.slashdot.org/story/100168 https://m.slashdot.org/story/100168 Bird Navigation Based On Quantum Zeno Effect from the schroedinger's-parrot dept. 2008 on /.
- behringer 5y agoAlso part of a bird's abilities is the ability to detect polarized light. It seems to work with the ability of birds to detect magnetic fields. See for an interesting read: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/6/1654 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/6/1654 Many or maybe most humans can also see the polarity of light. Take your smart phone and make the screen display a white image. While it shows this image for a long time, rotate the phone. You should see a yellow whispy checkerboard pattern turning with the phone. This "brush" is actually a visible measurement of the polarity of the light coming from the phone. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528539/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528539/ I don't know if there's any mechanism for which humans can detect magnetic polarity, but there's research on this too: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/can-humans-sense-the-magnetic-field--65611 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/can-humans-sense-...
- throwaway8451 5y agoAfter some practice I can see Haidinger's brush (=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush ) with little to no effort. Turns out that this is inadvisable! Why? Because now I can see the effect each time I have to change between screens in landscape and portrait orientation when they are next to each other. It was so distracting that I had to change back to a landscape-only setup.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoHuh, I can see it reliably but the effect is soooo subtle I can't imagine this being a nuisance. The dust that I often don't bother to wipe of my monitors is more of a problem (at least a few times in the past it masqueraded as punctuation).
- throwaway8451 5y agoDo you use dark background/dark mode? Dust shows a lot more on dark than on bright background while for Haidinger's brush it is the opposite.
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- dang 5y agoRecent and related: Unravelling the enigma of bird magnetoreception - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610181 - June 2021 (9 comments)
- xvector 5y ago"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"
- iszomer 5y agoBest John/Cavil quote of BSG!
- xvector 5y agoIt's a beautiful quote. I truly think what the quote describes is the endgame for our species. This short story conceptualizes the beauty of such an idea really well: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
- hoseja 5y agoI'm afraid the endgame is more akin to a specialized cell in a state-body. With apoptosis. It's just more competitive.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI think there is a likely endgame of 41C in the offing.
- ruined 5y agoim trying to parse what you said in some way that's not immediately interpretable as a read on the present but i keep failing
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- stevenhuang 5y agoRelated, here's a video by PBS Spacetime on how birds navigate using quantum mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A1ouV7iD8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A1ouV7iD8o
- sguav 5y agoAlso, in 2014, the very first episode of "The Quantum Around You" https://youtu.be/BRfkbwO8Als?t=214 https://youtu.be/BRfkbwO8Als?t=214
- Confusion 5y agoIt seems suspicious that this would be hiding in the eyes. A separate specialized organ would be more like the other senses.
- abroadwin 5y agoMaybe, or it might just have been convenient to evolve that way since there was already a high-bandwidth sensory system there.
- bregma 5y agoLike hearing and balance are both in the same sensory organ, and consist of sensitive hairs in liquid-filled chamber? Or the pancreas, which consists of separate endocrine and exocrine glands in one wibbly wobbly visceral organ? Nature would never do things like that.
- Confusion 5y agoI don't agree hearing and balance are the same sensory organ. They are two separate organs, just very near each other and indeed resembling each other, which explains why they are near each other. The thought I was expressing is that there seems to be no separate organ at all here and that seems unexpected to me. I would expect there to at least be something like a specialized region. Not just that the eye in general happens to also have this ability.
- Epokhe 5y agoThis kind of magnetic sensitivity seems to be dependent on receiving light, because the sensitive molecules form the radical pairs when exposed to light. With this information, evolving within the eye scenario sounds plausible to me.
- abeppu 5y agoI wouldn't say "suspicious", but I do think it's interesting. Yes, it needs to receive light, but any exposed part of the animal could do that. Does it "feel" to the animal like it's part of vision, in the way that we experience taste in an integrated way combining signals from taste and smell receptors? Does pairing with vision make it easier to process both together for navigation? That is, you're point is how a separate organ would make it like an independent sense; is it functionally beneficial for it to not be independent?
- rvba 5y agoSo we got animals with various very complicated eyes (magneto receptor, pistol shrimp...). But can they still see through glass?