Dennis Overbye is the Big Mind of the Day

A series of experiments found that when dung beetles can’t see the stars, the beetles wandered aimlessly. Take it away, New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye:

But a starlit sky, or just a dim band representing the disk of our humble home galaxy, is enough to keep them on track… 

It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful or humbling connection between the sacred and the profane, the microscopic and the large, inner space and outer space. 

The Milky Way is one of nature’s grandest creations: hundreds of billions of glittering stars, wreathed in ribbons of gas and dust, a cloudy, starry pinwheel so vast that a light beam would take 100,000 years to cross it and the Sun with its planetary entourage takes a quarter of a billion years to circle it once. 

And it is only one of countless galaxies, scattered like sand from here to eternity, rushing outward in the great expansion, whose meaning, if we are honest, is as fathomless to us as it is to a scarab pushing its carefully wrought investment portfolio through this garden of Earthy delights.