In the days when it was essential for marine navigators to be able to get a good visual fix on stars and other astronomical objects, many inventors tried to find ways of creating a ‘Marine Chair’ which would stay still while the ship rolled about in the middle of the ocean. Various national governments offered […]
Tag: navigation
“Humans smell in stereo” [new study]
Can we smell in ‘stereo’? Recent experiments performed at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing suggest that, to some extent, in some circumstances, the answer could be ‘yes’ – and, moreover, this stereo sense may be a navigational aid. The research team write that : “The human nose, the most protruding part of […]
Further adventures in dung-beetle-navigation research
Rachel Feltman chronicles, in the Washington Post, some further adventures of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning dung beetle navigation researchers: The humble dung beetle has a fantastic way of navigating the world If you’re a dung beetle, you spend a good portion of your life dancing around on top of a ball made of poop – a ball […]
When is a Transport Map Too Complex for Your Brain?
This new study explains, maybe, why so many people feel overwhelmed in navigating a big city by metro or bus. The study is: “Lost in transportation: Information measures and cognitive limits in multilayer navigation,” Riccardo Gallotti, Mason A. Porter, Marc Barthelemy, Science Advances, epub February 19, 2016. The authors, at the Institut de Physique Théorique, France, the […]
Marcus Byrne tells of the dung beetles and the Milky Way
Marcus Byrne tells about the dung-beetles-and-the-Milky-Way research that led to an Ig Nobel Prize for him and his colleagues, in this University of the Witwatersrand video: That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, in 2013, jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy, to Marie Dacke [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], […]
Dung Beetle insights: The Milky Way, and now the sun
The team that won an Ig Nobel Prize for discovering how dung beetles relate to the Milky Way has now, plus or minus some colleagues, discovered how the those beetles and their cousins relate, also, to the sun. They tell about it in a new study: “Neural coding underlying the cue preference for celestial orientation,” Basil el […]
The Kajimoto laboratory (part 3): Pull the ears to navigate
If you’ve ever had difficulty navigating your way around a complex department store, or experienced difficulty with a tricky transfer at a subway station, you may be interested in one of the many cross-modal human/computer research projects [see previous article in this series] which have been developed by the Kajimoto laboratory (a department of The […]
Marcus Byrne explains how dung beetles use the Milky Way
Ig Nobel Prize winner Marcus Byrne explains how dung beetles use the Milky Way, navigationally, to find its way home: [vimeo]80765214[/vimeo] (Thanks to Steve Ting for bringing this to our attention.)
Horvath: Like horseflies, like Vikings
Dr Gábor Horváth [pictured here], who discovered that white horses attract fewer flies (described here a few months ago), now may have shed light on an old, somewhat related question about Vikings. The study is “On the trail of Vikings with polarized skylight: experimental study of the atmospheric optical prerequisites allowing polarimetric navigation by Viking […]
Happily stuck in time and space
En route from Vancouver to Australia on Dec. 30, 1899, the captain of the S.S. Warrimoo spotted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At midnight, he stopped the ship at the intersection of the international date line and the equator. At that moment, the ship was straddling two different hemispheres, days, months, years, seasons, and centuries, all at […]