> “The big question is always the mechanism,” Goforth said. “What’s the mechanism and what is the sensor? We know that for the visual sense, you have eyes; for

> “The big question is always the mechanism,” Goforth said. “What’s the mechanism and what is the sensor? We know that for the visual sense, you have eyes; for the sense of smell, you have a nose; and for hearing, you have ears. But no receptor like that has been identified for the magnetic sense, and the mechanism remains unknown.” Interesting, I just barely listened to a Radiolab episode about magnetoreception in birds today [1]. The mechanism is thought to be cryptochrome, a type of protein that exhibits quantum effects when exposed to blue light [2]. The RadioLab story mentioned this mechanism was first proposed in the 70s (I think?) and it was heresy at the time a didn’t get published. Now there’s a SciAm article about it [3], and lots of blog posts. I wonder why this isn’t mentioned? Isn’t there a pretty good chance the mechanism is the same? * edit: BTW while listening to the podcast I was reminded of Haidinger’s Brush [4] - the fact that many humans can see polarization, once they know what to look for. I wonder if it’s potentially related to navigation since the polarization effect is strongest at 90 degrees from the sun… i.e., generally north and south, in the morning and evening, for much of the earth. [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/quantum-birds https://radiolab.org/podcast/quantum-birds [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome#Magnetoreception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome#Magnetoreception [3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-birds-use-quantum-effects-to-navigate/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-bir... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush