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Special Molecule Gives Birds a Magnetic Biocompass
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 11, 2006 08:37 PM
from the bio-magneto-driver dept.
from the bio-magneto-driver dept.
Aaron Rowe writes "CORDIS news reports that a team of scientists has identified a family of molecules called cryptochromes that allow migratory birds to sense magnetic fields. Curiously enough, these molecules only function when accompanied by blue light. The article also mentions, 'The researchers also suggest that, as cryptochromes have been strongly conserved throughout evolution, all biological organisms could have the ability to detect magnetic fields, even if they do not use them.'"
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Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
r-i-g-h-t.
thank you for the chuckle.
You have Navigation Lite Installed (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a BIOS setting. You have to turn it on at conception.
Parent
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You may be able to hack the setting w/o a reboot,
but be sure to backup your data first.
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Are you referring to the legendary Jake Neuton, illegitimate scion of a brief, but passionate affair between Sir Isaac Newton and an uncharged subatomic particle, and author of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Typographica?
My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a good sense of direction, but now and then I get all messed up. It's a really strange feeling when I realize this has happened, and the internal gyro has to flip 180 degrees. There's a sense of the world shifting, almost like motion.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
First time I visted a friends house, it was night time, and my sense of direction got flipped (I also wasn't driving). It now seems to be stuck that way. I can drive out there and tell exactly when my sense of north does a 180. Driving through a cutout in a hill, can't see anything but the sides of the trench, when coming from one direction, and from the other direction its a set of curves that are bounded in by dense trees.
So, gyroscope, yes, but i
Re:My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:4, Insightful)
These feats are nothing special really. Everybody has them to some degree, whether it is direction, or time, or reading expressions, or perfect pitch, or anything else. For instance I can set a 20 min pizza timer and go play a video game, pause it, and walk out with <5 seconds left on the timer. This happens very often. Do I have some magic genes that give me some digital internal chronometer? Doubtful, more likely I just have it in the back of my mind all the time.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure guys have a stronger sense of it then girls. Makes sense... hunting and all.
And the female job of gathering fruit, vegetables, and herbs from remote areas of the forest or savanah or whatever doesn't require a sense of direction.
Re: (Score:2)
Use of the sun by day or stars by night.
Jetlag or simple fatigue from air travel.
Re:My brother-in-law does sense it (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, if he actually could sense the magnetic field, he could tell which way was north and which was south. Thank God we dont have to tell magnets which say is 'North' to get them to work.
Parent
Radio (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a Bill Bailey joke (Score:4, Funny)
-1 offtopic.
Mind you, maybe I could strap a blue LED to an albatross and find my way home when I'm drunk.
+1 ontopic.
Where will the birds go during a pole reversal? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/
http://digg.com/general_sciences/North_Pole_Movin
No wonder those latent genes are turned off.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Extinction (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the thing is, magnetic pole reversals actually happen pretty often, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] at a rate of 1-5 events every million years. Since the dinosaurs lived 65-230 million years ago, by looking at this graph [wikipedia.org] we can deduce that during their existence they experienced a few dozen pole reversals.
Now that I look at it though, it is somewhat interesting that the Cretaceous Long Normal [wikipedia.org], an abnormally long (~40 million year) period during which there were no pole reversals at all, ended around 15 million years before the dinosaurs disappeared. I personally think it's just a coincidence, though.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Well despite what movies like The Core will make you believe, its not like this is their only way to tell where they are going. I believe they primarily rely on sight and memory, they are not just flying around there with their eyes closed.
Of course there is only one way to find out for sure. Tie big magnets to the bird's heads and see if they can still find their way South. If not, we know it plays a big role in their navigation. Either that or it weighed them down so much they couldn't fly.
Hey birds! (Score:5, Funny)
So is that how they know to migrate? (Score:2)
F=IL X B (Score:5, Insightful)
Iron in your nose (Score:5, Informative)
I will dispute their statement about pigeons though. I recall watching or reading something where the scientists put trackers on homing pigeons to discover how they found their way around. Turns out they follow landmarks.
The pigeons often took indirect routes, because they were following a road. The scientists didn't figure this out even after they realized the paths were very odd... it didn't click until someone looked at a road map.
Re:Iron in your nose (Score:5, Funny)
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Detecting Changing Magnetic Fields (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also, it's known that
Re:Detecting Changing Magnetic Fields (Score:5, Informative)
Note that while the magnetic moments are being manipulated, the actual water molecules themselves are more or less unaffected. This is one reason that MRI/NMR is such a great way to measure molecular self-diffusion- the phenomenon of diffusion is unaffected by all the magnetic fields being bandied about the sample. So to sum up, the "torque" the water molecules experience is one that affects only the magnetic orientation of the hydrogen atoms in your body, and not the actual physical orientation. And the signal that an MRI machine detects is not coming from the return to equilibrium of the water molecules as much as it comes from the precession of the asffected magnetic moments about the direction of the external field.
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I'm disappointed... (Score:2)
Why Blue Light? (Score:4, Interesting)
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red light causes a disruption,,, interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
These light sensitive molecules must be very important to the bird's balance as well as helping them migrate. I wonder if they use the magnetic field to remain upright as well, or if by the red light turning off the receptor magnetic-sensitive light receptor molecules, they temporarily go blind. REd light could be perceived to be much brighter to them than the other colors. Since if the red light shuts off the receptors, only a small amount must be blinding. It might be like flipping a light switch where all blue and green perception disappears and only red is left. I"m glad my eye's aren't affected by specific colors that way.
Caught up in assumptions (Score:4, Informative)
Is it because we have learned how to use magnetics for navigation, so we therefore assume that animals capable of sensing magnetic fields must use it for navigation as well? The problem is that this is a false assumption.
--Birds can sense magnetic information. However, when the olfactory nerve is cut, they get lost even when the trigeminal nerve remains intact. Birds which have had the trigeminal nerve cut but which had the olfactory nerve left intact could find their way home. So the claim is that being able to sense magentic fields was not required for homing pigeons.
Still, it is generally accepted that homing pigeions have the wetwork required to sense magnetic fields. And if not used for navigation, then what? Why did such a sense develop?
Put another way, what other perceptive planes of information exist which might make being able to sense EM fields useful?
ALL organisms might have this ability?
Chi-wiz.
-FL
Credit Card Validation (Score:3, Funny)
One quack good/accepted, two quacks bad/rejected.
Definately better than those stupid card swipe machines!
Birds also follow their noses (Score:3, Interesting)
According to a recent New Scientist article [newscientist.com], homing pigeons use their nose to find home rather than the Earth's magnetic field.
From the article:
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Re:I know this is SERIOUSLY OT but I need to ask. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I know this is SERIOUSLY OT but I need to ask. (Score:5, Funny)
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This explains that feeling you get from a BSOD (Score:2)
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Yes, but skylight is blue.
There is news, very small and buried at the end (Score:5, Informative)
Which is just basic, everyday scientific advancement: a very small and excruciatingly dull thing, presented with a tie-in to something more interesting in an attempt to look sexier and get funding. Scientists hate doing it, but if you want to keep doing science, that's what you do.
This article IS news, but only in the narrowest sense: new information. But after you take that new information, tie it in to something more interesting but only indirectly related (which you put at the front of the press release, and the actual new stuff at the end), then summarize it for Slashdot (skipping the stuff at the end), "news" becomes "olds".
One final note: when I call the work "small", I don't mean to dis the grad students who worked thousands of hours tending the plants, measuring them, putting that data into the computer, analyzing that data, probably cutting them open and measuring that... such immense grunt work for a minor advance [promptly blown up into something irrelevant by university's press department] is the heavy-lifting of science. It's gotta be done but it's not glamorous or even interesting.
Parent
Similar talent... (Score:3, Funny)