After a long-distance trip under the polite, if slightly repetitive instruction of your favorite GPS app, nothing is worse that being told how to navigate your own neighborhood.
Study from researchers at Western s Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR), home to the world s first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight, explores a brain region called cluster N that migratory birds use to perceive Earth s magnetic field. The team discovered the region is activated very flexibly, meaning these birds have an ability to process, or ignore, geomagnetic information, just as you may attend to music when you are interested or tune it out when you are not.
The Earth's magnetic field is not only a barrier against the Sun's cosmic radiation, it also serves as a navigation system for certain animals, such as