The Washington Post (June 9) -- Scientists believe that birds might use quantum mechanics to navigate, even in darkness, fog and featureless landscapes. When the idea was first proposed by biophysicist Klaus Schulten, then of the Max Planck Institute, a reviewer at the journal “Science” wrote back to him, “A less bold scientist would have designed this piece of work for the wastepaper basket,” the reviewer recalled in a history published by the U. of I.
Related story: Science (June 23) -- The fact that many animals sense and respond to Earth’s magnetic field is no longer in doubt, and people, too, may have a magnetic sense. But how this sixth sense might work remains a mystery. In 1978, Klaus Schulten, a physicist at Illinois, had suggested that animals could use radical-pair reactions for magnetoreception. But he didn’t have a molecule that could support those reactions until the late 1990s, when researchers discovered cryptochrome serving as a light sensor in mammalian retinas.