“Cows point north” not the oddest science story of the week

The winner is: Growing new ear hairs that can boost hearing

“Scientists have used gene therapy on mouse embryos to grow hair cells with the potential to reduce hearing loss in adult animals”

This is breakthrough news for those of us with hairy ears and lousy hearing. Now I’ll know when people say my unkempt ears look disgusting!

However the potential development of a bovine GPS is certainly my nominee for “Study Guaranteed to Win an Ig Nobel Prize.”

Somehow, cattle seem to know how to find north and south, say researchers who studied satellite photos of thousands of cows around the world. Most cattle that were grazing or resting tended to align their bodies in a north-south direction, a team of German and Czech researchers reports in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the finding held true regardless of what continent the cattle were on, according to the study led by Hynek Burda and Sabine Begall of the faculty of biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

Clearly we need to send three cattle into space and see if two of them still point north.

What with the recent advances in cattle miniaturization (NOT MAKING THIS UP), it seems quite possible that the big threat to TomTom could go Moo Moo.

Why do I think the people behind the cow study came up with the idea after a day of smoking pot and reading Gary Larson?

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Science proves what country music already knew: Booze makes you sad

Researchers at the University of Tokyo concluded that ethanol — an intoxicating agent in alcohol — does not cause memory to decrease, as widely believed, but instead locks it in place. The researchers, led by pharmacology professor Norio Matsuki, gave mild shocks to lab rats to condition them to fear. As a result, the rats would freeze in terror and curl up the moment they were put in their cages.

I hope the research paper cites “Haggard, Merle: Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down“