[TowerTalk] Magnetic North

[Jim Lux]

On 1/3/14 12:22 PM, David Robbins wrote:
> Sounds like some bored researchers with too much government money to
> waste... my dog doesn't spin around, he just stops, squats, and goes
> wherever he happens to be!

Au contraire...
that's what the study (70 dogs) was all about..
If you were to carefully measure your dog's position AND measure the 
local magnetic field, you'd find that they are correlated, with a pretty 
decent significance.

It's actually pretty interesting scientifically.
We know that birds have magnetic sensors.. And it's been theorized that 
mammals do too, so this is actually a fairly inexpensive way to look at 
it.. if you find out that there's some magnetic field correlation to 
behavior, that's a telling sign that there must be some sensing mechanism.


What would be interesting is to make sure that they're not being cued by 
some other factor (e.g. sun angles). If you keep dogs in a kennel with 
Helmholz coils to change the magnetic field, for instance.

Or Northern vs Southern Hemisphere (sun in the south in Norther, sun in 
the north in Southern.