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…
Did you observe in which direction the barn was relative to the cows axis? Our cows often are sort of ‘lined up~ chests towards the barn’ Any time of day, that I notice. Does this observation include cows near the equater?