Saturday, 25 May, 2013

A celebration of the urge to map, from the ancients to GPS, with detours into the male-female map-reading divergence, “X marks the spot,” and the role of maps in war.

How do homing pigeons find their way on their amazing migrations? For a decade, scientists thought iron-bearing nerve cells in the beak can detect Earth’s magnetic field. But those iron granules are in immune cells. So how do the birds do it?

A stone tool discovered in Polynesia came from Hawaii — 2500 miles away. Modern analytical techniques show that Polynesians did sail thousands of miles across the ocean — without a compass.