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Dung Beetles Navigate By the Milky Way; Pigeons Tune In To Magnetism
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science magazine's colorful synopsis of a paywalled article at Current Biology "A day in the life of a male dung beetle goes something like this: Fly to a heap of dung, sculpt a clump of it into a large ball, then roll the ball away from the pile as fast as possible. However, it turns out that the beetles, who work at night, need some sort of compass to prevent them from rolling around in circles. New research suggests that the insects use starlight to guide their way. Birds, seals, and humans also use starlight to navigate, but this is the first time it's been shown in an insect." Also on the topic of How Animals Get Around Without GPS, new research has considerably heightened scientists understanding of birds' sensitivity to magnetic fields. For homing pigeons at least, this ability seems to be tied to a cluster of just 53 neurons (original paper, also behind a paywall).
It's been hypothesized that pigeons also use polarized light to sense the position of the sun in the sky-sphere, even if the sun itself is obscured from direct viewing. It's been definitely shown to be true for:
-- honeybees : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_navigation#Orientation_by_polarised_light
-- squids eyes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye#Polarized_light
-- fishies : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_in_fishes#Polarized_light
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Pigeons have been tested for polarization sensing and magnetic field sensing by William Tinsley Keeton.
You dont have to be able to prove anything. You can just make up something and as long as it sounds good then youre a scientist. Hell you can be a good speaker and call yourself a scientist, if you can phrase and word things in a good way you can make up crazy stuff you have no idea about and people will believe you because there is no way to prove that youre wrong. And thats what a lot of "science" is, its saying something that sounds good while at the same not being able to be proved wrong.
"A dung beetle navigtes via the milky way" how you can you possibly prove that to be false?
Obviously you didn't get past the summary, or maybe even the title but what you claim is not science. Science is not spouting random things and waiting for someone else to prove you wrong. Go try that and you will have the credibility of the guy shouting that the end is near. Findings are whats published with procedures and methods used to reach those findings. Others interested can reproduce the experiment to try to get the same results to try to confirm those findings. If they can't reproduce the same results then the original finding must be declared false and reevaluated.
What you think of science is the result of journalists taking the findings and dumbing them down enough so people like you can understand a new fact.
Welcome to Slashdot. Paywalls don't matter to us because reading the articles is frowned upon.
That doesn't stop us from bitching about them though.
They just sound like the average IT worker: capable of dealing with huge piles of someone else's shit and when not doing that they are busy reinventing the wheel.