09/12/08 North-South cows

What do scientists do for light-hearted pass time? I'm Jeff Keane; I'll be back in one minute to tell you one activity. What do scientists do to pass the time and take their minds off all their technical research? According to an article in our local newspaper, some German scientists like to check out satellite images they can find on Google Earth. But, being the scientists they are, their analytical minds got the upper hand and the researchers started finding trends in the Google Earth images. What they found in any picture that had cattle figures is that most cattle whether resting or grazing aligned themselves in a north, south direction. Yep, approximately two-thirds of any herd of cattle lined up in this way. Only inquiring minds would have made that observation. Right away I'm thinking if only the old trail herders heading for Kansas knew that fact they would not have had to worry about pointing the chuck wagon tongue toward the North Star. All they would have had to do was ride to the herd in the morning, see which way two-thirds of them were resting, get them off the bed ground and keep pointing them that way. But that thought went out the window when I read the scientists said they couldn't tell from the images if the head or the tail of the animal was pointing north. The researchers don't even know just yet why cows line themselves this way and experts say there probably isn't any practical application of this observation. No doubt, a cow compass, although it would fit the all-natural trend of today, would be hard to pack around. I'm Jeff Keane.