Whereas the relationship of handedness to the ability to talk has been known to the ancients (Psalm 137, for example) the exact knowledge of anatomical underpinnings of this relationship at the public level is a new understanding. This article pursues another corollary of the anatomy sustaining laterality of motor control, i.e. the variability of the alien/unruly hand in patients who have suffe...

Hannah and Oldfield, Neil J. and Newton, Emma and Bai, Xilian and Aidley, Jack B. and Care, Rory and Mattick, Claire and Turner, David P.J. and Neal, Keith R. and Ala'Aldeen, Dlawer A.A. and Feavers, Ian and Borrow, Ray and Bayliss, Christopher D. (2014) Phase variation mediates reductions in expression of surface proteins during persistent meningococcal carriage. Infection and Immunity, 82 (6)...

year at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association and has been the subject, either directly or indirectly, of two papers to this Society within recent years. In 1925, Professor Rankine Lyle read a paper before us on the Conservation and Destruction of Intrauterine Life, in which he put forward a very strong thesis in favour of conservation always and destruction never. As a side lin...

1 Innogen Institute, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland 3 Institute for Bioengineering, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre, Institute of Genetic and Molecular Medicine, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, Scotland Correspon...

Brain asymmetry is widespread, but the presence of handedness in non-human animals is debated. A new study now provides evidence for handedness in bipedal - but not quadrupedal - marsupials.

Since prehistoric times, left-handed individuals have been ubiquitous in human populations, exhibiting geographical frequency variations. Evolutionary explanations have been proposed for the persistence of the handedness polymorphism. Left-handedness could be favoured by negative frequency-dependent selection. Data have suggested that left-handedness, as the rare hand preference, could represen...

The relationship between handedness and attentional performance is poorly understood. Continuous performance tests (CPTs) using visual stimuli are commonly used to assess subjects suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, auditory CPTs are considered more useful than visual ones to evaluate classroom attentional problems. A previous study reported that there was a...

Handedness is the single most studied aspect of human brain asymmetries. For long it has been thought to be a monogenic trait that can produce an asymmetrical shift of cerebral mechanisms, thereby producing right handedness. Nevertheless, a single gene explaining a sufficient amount of phenotypic variance has not been identified. The results of several recent studies using advanced molecular ge...

According to the Geschwind-Galaburda theory of cerebral lateralization, high intrauterine testosterone levels delay left brain hemisphere maturation and thus promote left-handedness. Human circulating testosterone levels are higher in the male fetus and also vary with length of photoperiod. Therefore, a higher prevalence of left-handedness, coupled with seasonal anisotropy (i.e., a non-uniform ...