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The Large Hadron Collider went on line despite the complaints and even reported death threats, and the world is still here. The hoopla concerned the very small but non-zero chance that something in the gadget would cause the formation of a black hole which would then destroy the earth or gobble it up or something. But, the LHC went through one of its shake down manuevers and we are still around. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that when the LHC starts up tomorrow or whenever ( it’s not like flipping on your coffee maker), a black hole won’t form, with catastrophic consequences. So keep on worrying. Remember absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It kind of reminds of World Jump Day… a hoax in which some German guy convinced a lot of people that earth’s orbit was wacky a little and that if everybody on the planet all jumped and landed (presumably) at the same time, the shock would push ole Terra back into the right orbit. They had a website and everything.
Here’s a link to the AP story:
LHC

Thomas Wolfe, please forgive me. Humans find animals interesting; no surprise there. It’s part of the general pushing and probing we do, trying to figure out what’s going on here, and wondering how all this stuff fits together, if it does. Apart from “mere” curiosity, studying critter behavior may tell us something interesting and useful. Cows, for example, seem to line up in a north-south pattern. Research appearing in an article published in PNAS, and reviewed in The Economist supports this. A team at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany studied Google Earth photos of cows, lots of cows, at many different times of day in lots of different places to see if there is some preferred way in which they stand, and there is. They like to stand in a North/South alignment, other things being equal. The further north, the greater the spread between the magnetic pole and the geographic pole and the bovines favor the magnetic pole. The article points out that resolution in the photos was not good enough to determine if the bossies liked to stand head to the north, or the reverse, but the researchers have some data on deer in the Czech Republic, who apparently also align in this pattern and who definitely like to look north. There is good support for the position that some birds navigate in their migrations via magnetic cues, and earth’s magnetism may serve many other species in useful ways. Some people have an almost uncanny sense of direction and some get lost going around the block. Maybe the answer is a magnetic one. Maybe the earth’s magnetism affects us in ways we don’t yet realize, and which we might be able to foster or cultivate, to our benefit.
Magnetic Cows