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Look up at the sky on a clear, moonless night, and you can make out the broad, hazy band of the Milky Way. For the longest time, observers were unsure what the milkiness was. Celestial clouds? Tiny stars? The “fiery exhalation” of large, sub-lunar stars, as Aristotle proposed? In 1610, using a telescope (a recent invention), Galileo revealed that the haze is made up of individual, barely visible stars; they are faint only because they are so distant. So continued the hard process of putting us in our proper cosmic place—an orientation that only gets more disorienting with each new scientific discovery. When you view the Milky Way, you are gazing through the plane of this disk and at the universe around and beyond—which, astronomers report, is imponderable, vast and contains billions of other galaxies. Are there other sentient beings out there? Who knows. On Earth, at least, humans suppose that we alone seek out the sweep of our own galaxy. But we’re wrong. |
In a paper in Current Biology ( below ), Marie Dacke, a biologist at Lund University, in Sweden, and her colleagues revealed that at least one other species takes guidance from the Milky Way: the dung beetle. What is Polarized light? Actually according to NASA it is just dust in the galaxy (and beyond) that has been polarized. When light reflects off surfaces or particles it can become polarized, which means that its electric fields -- normally oriented in all directions -- line up together in the same direction. Polarized sunglasses reduce glare by blocking polarized light. On a side-note: All insects walk the same way - except for three species of dung beetle, they gallop! ( Species: Pachysoma endroeydi, P. hippocrates and P. glentoni Habitat: The coastal deserts of Namaqualand in South Africa and Namibia ) |
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