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], […]

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 […]

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 […]