Link Banana

The Wired Science blog has a cool compilation of the relevant Digg bait.

Steven Levitt points to a rather absurd study: scientists used Google Earth to determine that cattle — and other large herbiovores — are more likely to graze while standing in a north-south direction. They think it has something to do with magnetic fields.

Scientists figured out why the Northern Lights flitter around:

The satellites confirmed that the storm was caused by a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection in which solar energy stretches the Earth’s magnetic field lines until they reach their limits and snap back into equilibrium. Like an earthquake in the sky, this releases enormous amounts of energy, and charged particles go flying into the atmosphere.