This doesn’t have anything to do with music, or songwriting…I just thought it was so fabulous that I had to bring it to your attention. Cows are actually large, beefy…compasses:
“German scientists using satellite images posted online by Google Earth have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years – cattle grazing or at rest tend to orient their bodies in a north-south direction just like a compass needle.
Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and their colleagues found that 2 out of 3 animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north…
The resolution of the images was not sufficient to tell which end of the cows was pointing north, though.”
Is this bombshell going to cut into GPS sales? Will all car rentals now come with a well-groomed cow in the passenger seat to provide directions?
Probably not. Here’s my favorite part of the article.
“Experts conceded that the research almost certainly has no practical applications.”
Ya think?