Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello!
I am a High School student looking for a way to do a science fair project revolving around the this topic: Animal Magnetism: Do larger mammals align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field? https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p058.shtml I am in the process of doing the full experiment looking at Google Earth at specific locations. The problem is that google earth does not update regularly. I have to have the data from my experiment done by December 4th, 2013. My science teachers and the lady in charge of my science fair are all stumped on what I should look at for data. I do not really want to change my whole project because of the amount of time I have left.

Hi,

I would like to help you, but you need to give me some more information. I don’t know what you mean by ‘align with the magnetic field’. For migration? How would you measure ‘alignment’? What are you looking for on GoogleEarth? What kind of data are you looking for? I did a search for ‘mammals plus magnetic fields’ and whales and bats were the only ones I found that are known to use the earth’s magnetic field.

The effects of magnetic and electromagnetic fields on animals is a really interesting area of research, but it doesn’t lend itself to science fair projects easily. Send another post with more details of how you plan to do this project and we will try to get you on track for the December 4 deadline.

Best wishes,

Sybee

Hi there,

I see that you are doing the Science Buddies project on Animal Magnetism (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p058.shtml), which is very cool. However, it does indicate in the summary that this project requires a long time to complete (at least a month, maybe more).

If you need to have all of your data by December 4th, I suggest doing another search through the Science Buddies project to find something you like with a shorter time frame. If you use the Topic Selection Wizard (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndaproject), you can indicate your time frame and find only projects that do not take a long time to complete.

I hope that helps!

Heather