Friday, April 30, 2004
Finding Things
Some of us humans are notorious for our inability to get from a given point A to given point B without help. I have certain friends who, it can be said, would get lost on the elevator between floors 1 and 5. There are others who have to have GPS in the car to get out of the driveway. Sea turtles don't share this problem: they navigate thousands of miles of open ocean each year between set feeding and mating grounds, without getting lost. Being human/scientists, of course, we want to know how this is done. It turns out that they seem to use the Earth's magnetic field (also a great band), as a sort of built-in GPS. This would come in handy: how long till I can get my own?
