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Dogs Defecate In Alignment With Earth's Magnetic Field
Daniel_Stuckey writes "But for whatever its worth, all that spinning is far from arbitrary. What dog owners witness is a small and furry version of the aurora borealis and a link between species and environment that's as holistic and beautiful as a dog pooping can be. A team of Czech and German researchers found that dogs actually align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field when they poop. Proving at least that they're really devoted to their work, the researchers measured the direction of the body axis of 70 dogs from 37 breeds during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that dogs "prefer to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions." They fittingly published their results [abstract] in the journal Frontiers in Zoology ."
sounds like a shitty job
I smell bullshit moving around the news media at this moment.
I suspect the dogs just don't like staring into the sun then they poo. I'd also speculate that since streets and walls tend to be aligned with the cardinal directions there's an overall alignment augmentation due to their surroundings. finally if they like to poo in a shadow of a tree then likely they may face back to the tree and thus have a bias to north or south alignments.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I do the same, and I have a special rotating toilet in my house for that purpose.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
So which causes which?
He defecates in random directions.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Alternative explanation. Dogs face away from the sun while crapping.
Where is the raw data?
Annoyingly enough some of it is under the sole of my shoe.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
mmm ...
... but have a dog.
:-) ... just I need to give the dog some food and to wait.
If I am in a tropical forest, and I can't see where is the sun because so many trees and every direction is "green", have no GPS neither a device with WIFI
I am saved
they won't poop on a magnetized carpet?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Alternative explanation. Dogs face away from the sun while crapping.
Where is the raw data?
Annoyingly enough some of it is under the sole of my shoe.
May Dog have mercy on your sole...
They really don't.
So stop dicking around already and put a dog in a Faraday cage to see if we can get a dog that doesn't poop!
I usually use frontline to get rid of the bugs my dogs may have.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Of all time.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
Does that mean that if i put a bunch of Molybdenum magnets under the sidewalk, i could get the dogs confused enough to stop pooping there?
Or maybe the opposite effect...
Must be nothing about the NSA today.
Should have been published in "Annals in Zoology" instead
I put a magnet on an RC toy car and got my dog to draw pictures on the lawn
Table-ized A.I.
I take pictures of our dog pooping and send them to my wife has pranks. "Hey, look at what the baby's doing. :dog shitting picture:" So, I went through them and sure enough she's either facing north or south in the backyard pinching a loaf. She maybe off by a 10 degrees, but never east or west with the same margin.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I wonder how many scientists who happen to own a dog are now writing grant applications.
(A draft of) the actual research article is freely available here. Key points not mentioned in the summary:
* the researchers concluded the magnetic field was responsible after observing the dogs lost their directional bias on days with geomagnetic storms, which is pretty cool IMHO
* the researchers did explicitly discuss bias due to the direction of the sun, and the measures they took to eliminate it from their study.
All in all, their findings are not to be taken as gospel (as always with original research), but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
Not only is it speculation, it is easily refuted speculation since time of day is considered in the actual article.
But this was perhaps the first time that magnetic sensitivity was proven in dogs, and it was also the first time that a predictable behavioral reaction to the fluctuations in the magnetic field—magnetic storms, often as resulting from solar flares—was proven in a mammal.
I might be off topic here, but...
My house sits almost exactly diagonal to Earth's magnetic field, meaning that - unlike Solomon's Temple - only the corners of the house face North, East, South or West. I noticed that both of my kids wiggle around in their sleep in order to have their head face East. This happens in their beds, as well as on the floor. I told my wife what I thought, and we did some experiments:
Beds:
I moved both of the kids' beds to have the head face East, and both kids slept straight in their beds (they didn't wiggle out of that direction at all - we tested this for a few weeks. When I moved them back, the kids wiggled to have their heads face East again. So I moved the beds back to have the head face East and left them that way.
Floor:
On the weekend we would put a bunch of blankets down in the living room and pass out watching movies. The kids would always wiggle to have their heads facing East. I changed the blankets to have their heads facing West, but the kids would wiggle around to have their heads facing East.
I don't really find that either my wife or I wiggle around to face a certain direction, but I do find it easier to fall asleep if I move my couch to have my head facing East. Not sure if anyone else has ever had a similar experience.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Of Cows and Power Lines
Cattle seem to have an internal compass--one that's messed up by power lines
Posted 1 Jul 2009 | 4:00 GMT
IEEE Spectrum
A team of researchers from Germany and the Czech Republic has already discovered that, all factors being equal, cattle and two species of deer tend to align themselves along a north-south axis using some innate magnetic sense, and that this preferred alignment is disturbed when they graze under high-voltage power lines.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/of-cows-and-power-lines
Could perhaps Bee colony collapse disorder be caused by the sudden increase of wireless technology that's been built since the early 2000's? Perhaps the bees simply can't navigate their way back to the apiary because their internal compasses are scrambled? That might explain why we haven't found any toxins or diseases that cause it.