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posted by mrpg on Sunday September 02 2018, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-cool dept.

ScienceAlert:

The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it's not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a protein in their eyes that lets them "see" Earth's magnetic fields.

These findings come courtesy of two papers - one studying robins, the other zebra finches.

The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it's part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes - photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals. These proteins play a role in regulating circadian rhythms.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday September 03 2018, @07:07AM (2 children)

    by pTamok (3042) on Monday September 03 2018, @07:07AM (#729774)

    Well, to a certain extent, that is one of the ways that language evolves. It used to be that imbecile, idiot, moron, feeble-minded were all terms used by the medical community [wikipedia.org].

    It is an interesting exercise (for small values of interesting) to try and work out a noun for 'toilet' that isn't a euphemism. The best I could find was the Australian word dunny [wiktionary.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2018, @09:38AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2018, @09:38AM (#729805)
    • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:07PM

      by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:07PM (#730215)

      Shit most probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European *sḱeyd-, *skeyd- (“to split, divide, separate”) [wiktionary.org], as your link shows. The thesaurus link gives all euphemisms of one type or another, with the possible exception of 'pisser', which would be a urinal rather than somewhere where you shit. It seems to be a weird cultural thing that the place where you shit is referred to by euphemism piled upon euphemism, with older euphemisms regarded as 'indelicate'.