Ed Yong
speaker
206 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's actually the other way around, really.
I was into animals for as long as I was into anything.
As a child, I went to zoos and watched nature documentaries and read books about wildlife that were way too advanced for me, but had very beautiful pictures.
So I've loved the natural world for my entire life.
Yeah, so this goes back to the 1950s when some German ornithologists were watching birds at the time when they're about getting ready to migrate.
Birds show this restlessness, this anxiety that in German is called Zugenruhe.
And these scientists just looked at these birds and realized that...
Their restlessness wasn't just random.
They tended to hop in a particular direction.
Like they had this sort of sense of which direction to go in.
Totally, yeah.
You could put them in a cage.
You could put the cage in a room that's completely isolated.
So dark, no view of any landmarks.
You can't see outside, much less the sun or the stars.
And the birds are still hopping in basically the right direction.
And then you can take wires and create an artificial magnetic field around the bird that basically flips the Earth's natural one.
And now they start hopping in the opposite direction.
Around them, yes, exactly.
I mean, I'm not sure I can define it for you exactly either.
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