Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action

Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to ‘see’ our planet’s magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics, and biochemistry that helps them navigate vast distances.

more…

Tau.Neutrino said:

Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action

Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to ‘see’ our planet’s magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics, and biochemistry that helps them navigate vast distances.

more…

““We think we have extremely strong evidence that we’ve observed a purely quantum mechanical process affecting chemical activity at the cellular level.”

But what does that mean?

Surely all process are ultimately quantum mechanical?

bookmarked this a couple weeks ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome

Tau.Neutrino said:

Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action

Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to ‘see’ our planet’s magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics, and biochemistry that helps them navigate vast distances.

more…

I’m getting quite cynical about the ability of any bird to sense magnetic fields.

To say that the original experiments were carried out without placebo controlled double blind statistically significant confirmation is an understatement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology

transition said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology

a good read that wiki page

“Magnetoreception refers to the ability of animals to navigate using the inclination of the magnetic field of the earth. A possible explanation for magnetoreception is the entangled radical pair mechanism. The radical-pair mechanism is well-established in spin chemistry, and was speculated to apply to magnetoreception in 1978 by Schulten et al.. The ratio between singlet and triplet pairs is changed by the interaction of entangled electron pairs with the magnetic field of the earth. In 2000, cryptochrome was proposed as the “magnetic molecule” that could harbor magnetically sensitive radical-pairs. Cryptochrome, a flavoprotein found in the eyes of European robins and other animal species, is the only protein known to form photoinduced radical-pairs in animals. When it interacts with light particles, cryptochrome goes through a redox reaction, which yields radical pairs both during the photo-reduction and the oxidation. The function of cryptochrome is diverse across species, however, the photoinduction of radical-pairs occurs by exposure to blue light, which excites an electron in a chromophore. Magnetoreception is also possible in the dark, so the mechanism must rely more on the radical pairs generated during light-independent oxidation.

Experiments in the lab support the basic theory that radical-pair electrons can be significantly influenced by very weak magnetic fields, i.e. merely the direction of weak magnetic fields can affect radical-pair’s reactivity and therefore can “catalyze” the formation of chemical products. Whether this mechanism applies to magnetoreception and/or quantum biology, that is, whether earth’s magnetic field “catalyzes” the formation of biochemical products by the aid of radical-pairs, is undetermined for two reasons. The first is that radical-pairs may need not be entangled, the key quantum feature of the radical-pair mechanism, to play a part in these processes. There are entangled and non-entangled radical-pairs. However, researchers found evidence for the radical-pair mechanism of magnetoreception when European robins, cockroaches, and garden warblers, could no longer navigate when exposed to a radio frequency that obstructs magnetic fields and radical-pair chemistry. To empirically suggest the involvement of entanglement, an experiment would need to be devised that could disturb entangled radical-pairs without disturbing other radical-pairs, or vice versa, which would first need to be demonstrated in a laboratory setting before being applied to in vivo radical-pairs”