Miss Magnetiq. Episode 4: North Pole — South Pole — Cow Dung

Octo­ber 2018 /// 
Vorder­stoder ///

After an extend­ed edu­ca­tion­al leave, attend­ing numer­ous cook­ing class­es and a stay abroad in Mag­ne­topol, Miss Mag­ne­tiq has reap­peared on the screen. In her cur­rent episode, togeth­er with her assis­tants Nick­el, Cobalt and Man­ganese as well as two cow assis­tants, she ded­i­cates her­self to an impor­tant task, name­ly the research of mag­net­ic cows.

A few years ago, Miss Mag­ne­tiq became aware of this research object dur­ing her dai­ly lec­ture of ORF Online arti­cles: “Farm­ers have known this phe­nom­e­non for a long time: Cows like to look in the same direc­tion when graz­ing. There were many hypothe­ses to jus­ti­fy this behav­iour, includ­ing the fact that they turn towards the sun so that as large a part of their body as pos­si­ble is illu­mi­nat­ed. How­ev­er, this left the ques­tion open why the ani­mals also show a clear ori­en­ta­tion on cloudy days. Hynek Bur­da and his col­leagues there­fore exam­ined anoth­er the­sis three years ago, name­ly that cows fol­low earth mag­net­ism. To prove this, they analysed a total of 308 pic­tures of pas­tures on which around 8,500 ani­mals grazed — all tak­en from the satel­lite image pro­gram Google Earth. The eval­u­a­tion, which the researchers described as ’sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant’, clear­ly indi­cat­ed a north-south ori­en­ta­tion of the cows”. (ORF Online, 15 Novem­ber 2011)

In a sci­en­tif­ic test series in autumn 2018, Miss Mag­ne­tiq tried to change the north-south ori­en­ta­tion of a herd of cows on a Vorder­stoder Alm in Upper Aus­tria with her super­pow­ers. With­out suc­cess. Cobalt’s com­ment­ed on this suc­cinct­ly: “!gnud oomyl­woC !citengam epon oomylwoC”