Power Lines Do Effect Us or Do Power Lines effect Us?

Here is a nice view of the Bourgogne countryside from Joël's room. Of course there are the ever present Charolaise grazing on the hills.

Image by Gros Chigy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This sight got me to thinking about a study I had heard about on a podcast a few months ago, regarding the way cattle stand in fields.

Of course "they stand with their rears to the wind in a rainstorm" makes a lot of sense, otherwise things would be very uncomfortable. But this study was about the way cattle stand in circumstances that offer more freedom.

It was in 2008 that a German team of scientists claimed that they had found that herds of cattle tend to orientate themselves with the magnetic lines of the earth. Interestingly this was proven by comparing herds close to and well removed from overhead power lines. The reasoning being that the power lines would result in herds nearby not being able to orientate themselves to the earths magnetic lines because their sensing system would be disrupted by the magnetic field from the lines.

What I like most about this story is the innovative use of free information available in Google Earth.

There has been some discussion about the results with another team not being to replicate the results, but the original results, at least for now seem to remain valid!

At a casual glance the two herds in this photo seem to be orientated in a similar direction, although one is under a power lines. Of course two observations don't constitute proof! So I wonder If and how the power lines effect us?