The Sixth Sense? [Microwave Surfing]

For many years, scientists have known that certain biological organisms ranging from bacteria to birds possess the faculty of magnetoreception [3], i.e., the ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field. But do human beings also have this sixth sense? Recent research from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) offers some tantalizing clues. Let’s start with the bacteria, because their “magnetoreceptors are still the only ones scientists have definitely located and studied.” In 1975, Richard Blakemore at the Woods Hole Oceano graphic Institution in Massachusetts found that certain bacteria from Cape Cod marsh muds “harbored chains of magnetic crystals” and, “as swimming compass needles,” could follow the direction of the local geomagnetic field, which dips down at an angle of 70° toward the north pole. Blakemore’s work inspired Caltech geologist Joe Kirschvink to study magnetic bacteria in the southern hemisphere (actually in a sewage treatment pond near Canberra, Australia), and he found that “sure enough, they swam down toward the south pole."