Birds See Earth's Magnetic Field With Quantum Physics | 2021

Indexé : 2026-05-20

In 2021, an international team led by Jingjing Xu at the University of Oldenburg published the cleanest evidence yet that migratory birds sense Earth's magnetic field using quantum entanglement. The protein cryptochrome 4, isolated from a European robin's retina, forms an entangled radical pair when struck by light — and the entanglement persists long enough for the molecule to detect the geomagnetic field. Quantum effects, long thought to be confined to ultracold isolated laboratories, are running inside warm wet biological tissue. Birds may literally see the magnetic field as a faint pattern overlaid on their normal vision. Referenced research: Xu, J., Jarocha, L. E., Zollitsch, T., Konowalczyk, M., Henbest, K. B., Richert, S., Golesworthy, M. J., Schmidt, J., Déjean, V., Sowood, D. J. C., Bassetto, M., Luo, J., Walton, J. R., Fleming, J., Wei, Y., Pitcher, T. L., Moise, G., Herrmann, M., Yin, H., Wu, H., Bartölke, R., Käsehagen, S. J., Horst, S., Dautaj, G., Murton, P. D. F., Gehrckens, A. S., Chelliah, Y., Takahashi, J. S., Koch, K.-W., Weber, S., Solov'yov, I. A., Xie, C., Mackenzie, S. R., Timmel, C. R., Mouritsen, H., & Hore, P. J. (2021). Magnetic sensitivity of cryptochrome 4 from a migratory songbird. Nature, 594(7864), 535-540. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03618-9 #QuantumBiology #Birds #MagneticField #Cryptochrome #QuantumEntanglement #QuantumMind #Magnetoreception #2021Nature