Remembrance of things past
“A photograph of Ahmad (unlike his father, he did not object to being portrayed) shows him watching the executions, surrounded by family and courtiers. The Imam sits in the middle, his great bulk clothed in white, his face framed by a dense beard (dyed black it was said to have gone gray prematurely during a fight with a jinni who was guarding a treasure), a white turban on his shaved head. The eyes, the famous exophthalmic stare said by his detractors to have been deliberately induced by sleeping with a rope tied around his neck, study the scene with shrewd but yet bemused appreciation”. (Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Yemen, the unknown Arabia.New York: The Overlook Press, 2000:107.)
Birds may have magnetic eyes
Every year millions of birds migrate north and south looking for a more plentiful food supply. The puzzle of how birds know where to fly has bemused and interested humans for centuries. Now, this past February, a group of investigators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has proposed that birds may have a unique way of seeing. These investigators' new theory suggests that birds can “see the earth's magnetic field in dim blue or green light”. According to this theory, incoming blue or green light activates a light sensitive pigment in the bird's eye, which in turn gives rise to electrically charged molecular fragments. The charged fragments can occur in one or two quantum mechanical states, and the rate at which one of the states is produced depends on local conditions of the earth's magnetic field. The varying chemistry in the bird's eye thus serves as a reliable indicator of …
