Every year, great white sharks travel over 12,000 miles from South Africa to Australia, charting a nearly perfect straight line across the ocean. And every year, they turn around and travel back.

How does a magnetic compass work? Well, it’s all down to basic physics and human ingenuity. The key component of a standard baseplate compass is its magnetized needle, which is allowed to spin freely ...

Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) can learn to associate food with the geomagnetic signatures of various oceanic regions, suggesting that they are able to find known foraging areas using an ...

Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field generated by electric currents from within the planet. Compasses take advantage of this field to identify north and serve as a navigational aid. But one social ...

Many migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field as a compass, but some can also use information from that field to determine more or less where they are on a mental map. Eurasian reed warblers ...

Imagine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you feel the urge to ...

Loggerhead turtles are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field in two ways, but it wasn’t clear which sense the animals use to detect the magnetic field when navigating using the magnetic map they ...

On Earth, the magnetic field of our planet points a compass north, but in space, things are a bit more complicated. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Learn more about loggerhead turtles’ ability to feel the magnetic field throughout their migrations — an ability that they’ve revealed to researchers through dancing.