Terrapattern is Like a Search Engine for Satellite Imagery

In 2008, through something of a happy accident, a team of zoologists from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany discovered that grazing cows and deer tend to align their bodies with magnetic north. It was an odd thing to notice, particularly because the researchers had been perusing satellite imagery for something else entirely. But that's what happens when you look at something from 400 miles above the Earth's surface--change your perspective, and you'll change what you see. When Golan Levin, a professor of new media art at Carnegie Mellon University, heard about the cow discovery, he found it "to be simultaneously wonderful and very inspiring and totally useless." He was also overcome, he says, by the desire to make similar discoveries.