This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

GPS has completely transformed how we get around,

but other animals have long had their navigation systems built right in like ants and bees

We know that their eyes are quite sensitive to polarized light and the sky has a particular pattern of polarized light relative to the position of the sun.

Barbara Webb, a biopottisist at the University of Edinburgh.

You can see polarized light firsthand, take a pair of polarized sunglasses and rotate them against the sky,

and the light passing through the lenses changes.

Webb says the insects have polarization like that built right into facets of their compound eyes.

You can think of it as the equivalent of having a little polarization

directional filter over them or lots of sunglasses pointing in different directions.

But Webb was curious whether there's really enough information in the sky to give insects a highly accurate sense of direction.

So her team built a sensor modeled after a desert ant eye and put it under artificial light meant to

simulate the sky. They then fed that sensor input into a computational model

meant to mimic the brains of desert ants, crickets, and other insects with a celestial compass.

And they found that with the insects innate sensing and processing equipment, they can

likely sense compass direction down to just a couple degrees of error. The results are in the journal

Ploss computational biology. A system based on that of insects could someday be a

cheap low-energy alternative to GPS.

Insects have very tiny brains, a brain the size of a pinhead that's using hardly any energy and

yet they're still able to navigate better than we can even with GPS which is a huge infrastructure.

Webb is now working on building a robot that can just like the desert ant

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