Completely unrelated to brains, but quite possibly the neatest sentence I’ve seen in a journal article lately:

Body axes of cattle (Bos primigenius) of 308 evaluated herds/pastures (displayed on satellite images in Google Earth) showed a significant deviation from random distribution (Rayleigh test, P < 0.00001) with a preference for a rough N-S direction (mean vector: 5.4°/185.4° with geographic north as reference).

Translation: Begall et al. (note: PNAS online; restricted access) used Google Earth to show that cows like to face North/South, an observation that (as far as we know) none of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who have good reason to interact with cows on a daily basis had ever noted before. The modern ability to conduct cutting-edge science from the comfort of one’s laptop (cf. The HapMap Project, fMRI data center, etc.) continues to amaze…