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Scientists Discover Cows Point North
Posted by
samzenpus
on Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:44 PM
from the throw-away-your-compass dept.
from the throw-away-your-compass dept.
Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen have discovered that cows tend to point north. The researchers studied deer in the Czech Republic and looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth. The animals tended to face north when eating or resting. "We conclude that the magnetic field is the only common and most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment," the scientists wrote in an article. I guess cows will become the must-have item for long-distance hikers now. Having an edible compass would come in handy if you get lost.
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You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it possible? Yes. But I wonder how many factors they really looked into before coming to this conclusion. What about how cows perceive things like the locations of houses, barns and roads. Are a lot of farms on north/south roads or are fields on the south side of the farm so the cows are facing towards the barn or house? I don't know, but from reading the article, it doesn't sound like they looked into much other than making conclusions from Google Earth. What about the fact that aeriel photography is done during certain times of the day or during certain seasons. Surely those have an effect on cows. Poor science in my opinion. And the sad thing is that an article like this only causes people to start propogating facts that might be wrong. Not that what direction cows face is a big deal, but its common enough that it only propogates stupidity.
And why use Google Earth? Indiana (I know cows are sacred in India) seems like a prime candidate for studying cows from space. In 2005 Indiana University released a complete set of aerial photos of the whole state that had as high as 6" per pixel resolution. Which is better than Google Earth.
Besides that, how many good research scientists are going to promote their work by posting a link to Slashdot to an article in a newspaper.
Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:4, Insightful)
They may just like sun on their backs and not in their eyes.
Not everything requires 'scientific' conjecture (which is, I think, your point.)
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
They may just like sun on their backs and not in their eyes.
Next, these researchers will discover a bizarre new breed of Australian cows that like to point south.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
not to mention goats in 4 varieties of leg length, uphill goats, downhill goats, leftfacing goats and rightfacing goats. Legs on the upper slope will be shorter.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant cow." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the cow standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's cows all the way down!"
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
I believe your right. It appears that the first was, in fact, a shorten version of the longer post. Both conveyed the same concept and nearly all details could be implied from the original statement.
Furthermore, I believe it should be pointed out that the first post was only a single sentence in length; however, the second post was a full three paragraphs of text.
I just wrote this to point out that your statement was indeed correct and appeared too short so I figured I should expand on it. Perhaps the second poster will understand a three paragraph explanation of your statement.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
You believe his right to do what?
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
what was the comment again?
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
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Now you're getting silly (Score:5, Funny)
By the way, do rodeo bulls in the northern hemisphere tend to spin in the opposite direction as southern hemisphere bulls? Someone should do a study on this.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but I also just wanted to be the first to call this finding bullshit. ;-)
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Informative)
.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Informative)
Huge variations in the wind direction and sunlight in the areas where the beasts were found meant that the scientists were able to rule out those factors as being responsible for the direction they were facing.
Thanks for playing our game! Please accept this consolation prize - RTFA: The Home Game! Now you can play RTFA right from the comfort of your own television set!
Parent
Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about learned patterns of sunlight corresponding to landmarks? Or did they also try blinding the cows?
Or sealing them inside a large white dome with no discernible edges so that it was all white to infinity?
And did they ask for guns? lots of guns?
Parent
Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
!=
The first one could mean the scientist ruled out the amount of sunlight the area gets on average. (Oslo gets less sun than Palermo)
The second one means they took the pictures at various times in the day.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the cows know global warming is an imminent danger, and are trying to avert the situation by providing a net thrust on the Earth to push us into a higher orbit.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Interesting)
They may just like sun on their backs and not in their eyes.
As most glider pilots can tell you, cows have their backs against the wind. We use them for wind cues during emergency landings.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was an article in the paper last winter about ranchers having to roam their pastures at night looking for cattle giving birth (They give birth in the middle of winter). The calves would immediately need to be taken to a barn, otherwise they would quickly freeze in the -20 to -30 temperatures we frequently get during winter nights.
Adult cows are very hardy though, and survive just fine in extreme cold, although they do tend to huddle together to block the wind and conserve each others heat.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative to causation is not only reverse causation. Correlation could be due to causation in either direction, but also due to a shared cause or even total coincidence.
For example, the building I live in is lined up north/south. Is this due to the Earth's magnetic field? No, it's because it's built on a north/south road.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
who the hell tagged this story with "correlationisnotcausation"?
Clearly, they were referring to the Google practice of using cows to orient their aerial photographs northward.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_magnet [wikipedia.org]
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
Chickens are also fed a smaller version of these, just after birth.
It's called a chick magnet.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I have this stash of about 400 neodymium magnets, I'm going to have lots of fun burrying them in the local farmers fields in exciting patterns.
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I have this stash of about 400 neodymium magnets, I'm going to have lots of fun burrying them in the local farmers fields in exciting patterns.
Try to get them to spell out "eat mor chiken".
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Re:You too can be an armchair scientist. (Score:5, Funny)
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Small proviso (Score:5, Funny)
Correlation is not Causation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Correlation is not Causation (Score:5, Funny)
So now we've got true north, magnetic north, and bovine north?
Parent
I propose a new Game Show (Score:5, Interesting)
I shall call it, "Are You Smarter Than a Scientist?" Just pick any old science type story, read a poorly written summary of it, then 'prove' the scientists in question are idiots who didn't even consider the Most Obvious Thing. All Slashbots are welcome to compete.
Re:I propose a new Game Show (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, I'll play!
My theory is that Google Earth does take good pictures of cows. The resolution isn't good in rural areas where cows normally reside, and it isn't economically feasible to take high-res photos of every single farm. So what they did instead was invested a bunch of money taking one really, really accurate cow picture. Then they did a global search and replace, replacing all the fuzzy cows with their one HD Cow. That cow happened to be facing north-- and thus, all cows seem to be facing north
For the lightning round, I'll suggest they only looked at one herd of cows, and since cows are herd animals, they were all pointing the same direction.
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Re:I propose a new Game Show (Score:5, Insightful)
Critical thinking is good, of course, but what usually happens here is that people think for about ten seconds, come up with something obvious, and just assume that the researchers who've been working on for months and sometimes years somehow never thought of it. Like this guy, [slashdot.org] for one example.
Parent
Busy schedule (Score:5, Funny)
when eating or resting
As distinct from all the other varied activities cows fill their day with.
Thanks, Slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm very glad that Slashdot finally added the ability to include informative pictures with their stories. For too long, I've seen news stories about cows and wondered to myself, "What exactly is a cow? What does one look like?" Now, thanks to this excellent feature, I no longer have to suffer the embarrassment of cow ignorance.
Thank you Slashdot!
Re:Thanks, Slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
The picture is actually related to the article, since the cow has a map of Earth on her side, with North at her top!
Parent
better article (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7575459.stm [bbc.co.uk]
This one also states that the herd orientation is different around the South Atlantic Anomaly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly [wikipedia.org]
Probably due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite [wikipedia.org]
And can't forget us.. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=49775 [nih.gov]
Where does Gary Larson Live? (Score:5, Funny)
TV Satellite dishes point south (Score:5, Funny)
TV Satellite dishes point south - So when I'm lost in the wilderness, that's what I look for.
But a lot of cows have a magnet in their stomach! (Score:5, Interesting)
This article does not make any mention of Cow Magnets [magnetsource.com], used to prevent hardware disease [wikipedia.org] in cows.
IANAP but I am curious if it is related.
ASCII Cows (Score:5, Funny)
Never before has the slashdot junk character filter been so unfortunate.
Moo [baetzler.de].
Not correct. (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry - these guys should have spoken to some paraglider or hang glider pilots before their study. What they would have been told is that at wind speeds exceeding about 5 knots at ground level, cows and horses put their tails into the wind, and keep their heads downwind.
I have used cow-filled paddocks as excellent wind socks on numerous occasions: if cows are NOT aligned in any particular direction, then I know winds are lighter than 5 knots, and I look for other tell-tales of wind direction (smoke, or dust mainly).
At over 5 knots though, cows are extremely reliable, and I have never suffered a downwind landing after checking the cow-orientation of a nearby field.
Re:How about a simpler explanation? (Score:5, Funny)
Visions of Wile E. Coyote leap to mind...
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Re:Time-averaged sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps they are showing reverence to the almighty invisible polar cow.
I hear he's where 2% milk comes from.
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Re:Time-averaged sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
"He"? Dude, I'm never drinking 2% milk again. *shudder*
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Re:Time-averaged sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
I also noticed that the cows in a herd all used to point the same direction. It might be north, or it might be south. The prevailing winds in this area tend to be from the north during the winter and the south during the winter. You can ask any rancher, and he will tell you that cows stand with their backs to the wind.
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Re:Time-averaged sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Which must be confusing for the cows...
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Re:Subject Requires More Study IMO (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure this subject warrants any study at all...
Funny, but you never know, a lot of discovers come from looking into non-obvious places.
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Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
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