The Economist (August 30) reports on research by a team from the University of Duisburg-Essen on animal magnetism - not animal charisma, but animals responding to the magnetic polarities of the earth. Studying pictures from Google Earth, they “concluded that cattle do generally align themselves in a north-south direction. Moreover, at high latitudes - where the geographical and magnetic poles are perceptibly separate from one another - it was to the magnetic pole that animals pointed. Unfortunately, even the high resolution of Google Earth is not good enough to tell routinely which end of a cow is its head, and which its tail.”

People appear to respond to the poles too: “there have been studies which suggest that magnetic fields influence biological processes such as rapid eye movement in sleep. Also, electroencephalograms seem to vary according to the direction in which people are facing when they are recorded.”

The writer suggests it’s analogous to GPS, but my first thought was feng shui.