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Bird Navigation, Dark Matter, Biblical Archaeology, and More

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While we sleep this spring, billions of birds will be flying through the night from their wintering grounds to their breeding territories. Bird migration is a mind-bendingly astonishing phenomenon: these tiny creatures fly thousands of kilometers with enough precision to return to the same nesting site year after year. They use three types of compass, … Read more

Bird navigation: Slope of Earth’s magnetic field may be ‘stop sign’ for migrating species

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Eurasian reed warblers migrate to sub-Saharan Africa each year – and they seem to use the slope of Earth’s magnetic field to judge when they have reached their European breeding grounds Life 27 January 2022 By Alex Wilkins A Eurasian reed warbler Shutterstock / Rafal Szozda Some birds rely on Earth’s magnetic field to navigate and … Read more

Satellite navigation: GPS software boost gives location to within 10 cm

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The software that allows smartphones to locate themselves is generally accurate only to within a few metres, but UK start-up Naurt claims its software can locate a device to within 20 centimetres Technology 4 January 2022 By David Hambling Satellite navigation software allows smartphones to determine their location Radoslav Zilinsky/Getty Images It is possible to … Read more

A Near-Future Plague, the Neuroscience of Navigation, and More

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Fiction Review by Robin MacArthur How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu William Morrow, 2022 ($27.99) Sometimes a novel comes along that feels so prescient—so startlingly aligned with the happenings of the real world—it seems plausible that the author was attuned not just to scientific foreshadowing but to some divinatory reading of … Read more

GPS: US Navy is developing navigation based on cosmic rays for the Arctic

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At higher latitudes, traditional GPS navigation is not reliable, but muons produced when cosmic rays hit Earth’s atmosphere could be used to navigate in the Arctic, as well as underground or in the water Technology 7 December 2021 By David Hambling An artist’s representation of high-energy cosmic rays colliding with Earth MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy … Read more