I am Mighty.
We know that birds and fishes can globe-trot the earth
with great precision.
And we have long known that birds use the earth’s magnetic
field, but we didn’t know there was a protein called cryptochrome in the eye
that did it.
We know that critters are great finders, dogs can find
their way home over vast distances, wild horses can find good feeding areas
after a long absence and a long distance away. Wildebeests migrate, caribou migrate. birds
are el primo specimens at it. When I was a teenager we moved from the farm to
the city, and our two Siamese cats walked back to the farm twice, although they
rode to the city in a car. After the second trip, the people who bought the
farm decided to keep them.
Now we find a substance in the eye called cryptochrome
that detects magnetic fields and helps in directions.
(I read that dogs pee or poop aimed North or South.
Have you observed that?)
And we have cryptochrome in our eyes.
Actually, we have two called Cry1 and Cry2.
Lauren Foley of the University of Massachutes Medical
School works with Drosophilia flies.
That’s a big name for a little common fruit fly—those little
buggers that are so annoying at home, are a favorite among researchers.
Why?
Because they
have short lives, and therefore mutate often. Their eye color which varies is
often used in genetics studies.
Foley found mutant flies that lacked CRY, and therefore
could not detect magnetic fields. They had trouble finding their food too.
HOWEVER, when they received human CRY2 in their eyes, (you need a microscope
top do this) those flies could detect magnetic fields, just like their normal brothers
and sisters.
We, humans, do use cryptochrome, and we know it is
instrumental in the circadian rhythms, which is our sleep/awake cycle.
For most of us, we get sleepy at nighttime, and
usually around a certain time. And you
know that your energy waxes and wains during the day—about 4’oclock I start to
yawn. Some want a nap after lunch. many are wide-eyed and bushy-tailed in the
morning, not so much in the evening. The circadian rhythm is responsible for
that.
I found a comment that cryptochrome is homologous
(same as) DNA photolyase (an enzyme that repairs DNA). What?
DNA?
Scientists studying DNA have proven that we
ARE light beings.
And, you thought all that talk about us being light
beings was airy-fairy.
For some time, scientists have been searching DNA to
see if it had fluorescent qualities. Nope, no light.
Until one day…
Researchers discovered that the DNA was turned off.
They shined a light on it, and it turned on. It gave back more light
than they had put in.
Ah, sweet mystery of life.
It appears that the dark stage of DNA is very long,
while the light phase is very short. You got-a catch those little buggers at
the right time. Rather like electrons being a particle or a wave, depends upon
when you look at them.
This makes me wonder about something I heard from a
biologist that worked at Nikon Industries. She said that she saw human
fertilization in a petri dish, and when the sperm entered the egg, there was a
glow.
In zygotes (a fertilized egg) the cells are asleep for
a time, and then they wake up, although nobody knows what awakens them. Nobody
knew what awakened the DNA either—until they found it was light.
The consensus is that humans cannot sense magnetic
fields. It could be that we have a disconnect between our eye and our brain—but,
who knows, maybe we just haven’t found the light switch yet.
This is getting complicated, shall I continue?