Small Gray Matters » cows http://www.smallgraymatters.com of brains and their minds Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:27:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 bovine science, Google Earth style http://www.smallgraymatters.com/2008/08/25/bovine-science-google-earth-style/ http://www.smallgraymatters.com/2008/08/25/bovine-science-google-earth-style/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:35:46 +0000 small and gray http://www.smallgraymatters.com/?p=31 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…

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