In this week’s issue of Science:
From Germany’s Oldenburg University: “Our experiments show that EM noise exposure disrupts the orientation of bats several hours beyond the exposure period” [emphasis added].
“Disruptive Effects of Brief RF Noise Exposure on Migratory Bat Navigation,” Science, May 28, 2026.
An accompanying commentary, “Silent Interference,” points outs:
“These effects persisted for more than two hours after the exposure period. The findings demonstrate that human-generated RF noise at levels that are commonly encountered by wildlife can have a long-lasting impact on sensory or navigational mechanisms that control animal orientation behaviors.”
The paper took two years to clear peer review at Science.
The same issue of Science has another extraordinary paper on avian navigation. Indeed, it’s the cover story: “Finding Home: Liver Macrophages Guide Pigeons on Cloudy Days.” It too has a commentary: “Getting Home in the Dark.”
If this were not in the nation’s leading science journal, it would be tempting to discount. In short, a team of German scientists are proposing a new way to explain how birds detect the Earth’s magnetic field —through the action of macrophages in the liver. Messages are then transmitted to the brain. [A short intro to macrophages.]
Here’s a somewhat more formal explanation from the paper:
Three principal theories for magnetoreception in pigeons have been proposed to date. Our findings support a fourth mechanism, on the basis of the collective sensing capacity of superparamagnetic macrophages, located predominantly in the liver, that enables perception of geomagnetic direction.
“How could macrophages transmit a signal encoding magnetic field information to the brain?” the commentary tries to explain, though not without raising some concerns about the underlying science.
https://microwavenews.com/papers/rf-noise-affects-bat-navigation