Scientists are slowly uncovering the workings of many animals’ ability to sense magnetic fields and navigate by them, or magentoreception. The nature of the electromagnetic radiation affecting ...

Birds navigate incredibly long distances using what the neuroscientist David Keays calls “a sixth sense": the ability to detect how the earth’s magnetic field changes at different locations around the ...

Migratory birds use a magnetic compass in their eye for navigation. Its basic sensory mechanisms have long remained elusive, but now researchers reveal exactly where in the eye, the birds' control ...

A background buzz of electromagnetic waves from such ordinary sources as electronic equipment can interfere with a bird’s magnetic compass, according to a particularly careful set of experiments.

A quantum effect known as entanglement may be part of the compass that birds use to sense Earth’s magnetic field, researchers report in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. Critters from bacteria to ...

The magnetic compass that birds use for orientation is affected by polarized light. That is the finding of researchers in Sweden, who studied zebra finches navigating a simple maze and found that the ...

Not only migratory birds use a built-in magnetic compass to navigate correctly. A new study shows that non-migratory birds also are able to use a built-in compass to orient themselves using the ...

One of the theories for the incredible navigational skills of birds is that they can sense magnetic fields through the magnetite in their beaks — essentially giving them a built-in compass. It’s one ...

It's been an ongoing quest for researchers in the field of ornithology to try to zero in on specifically where a bird's navigation system resides in their heads. But now a team of European scientists ...

Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations. The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen ...

For decades, scientists have known that migratory birds use Earth’s geomagnetic field—along with light, stars, and other cues—to guide them on remarkably long journeys. But it is unclear just how ...

A team of researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Oxford are the first to model a photochemical compass that may simulate how migrating birds use light and Earth's weak magnetic ...