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About half the world's population is right-handed but has left-handed family members. Such right-handers have special neurological organization of language and thought. This has implications for therapies and our understanding of the genetic bases for language. Our brain imaging studies show that grammatical knowledge is represented differently if you have left-handers in your family. For example, when it comes to language, everyone’s brain responds to certain language tasks quickly. But that response is much stronger in the brain's right hemisphere if you have left-handers in your family and stronger in the left hemisphere if you have no left-handers in your...

OKEMAH, Okla. -- A 4-year-old was allegedly forced by his teacher to write with his right hand, even though he’s left-handed. The child was sent home with a letter about how left-handedness is often associated with evil and the devil. Zayde is only 4 years old. It's his first year at Oakes Elementary in Okemah, but his mom kept him home Monday after a dispute with his teacher over being left-handed. Zayde, like most kids in Pre-K, is learning how to read and write. And like his mom, Alisha, Zayde is a lefty. “From picking things up to throwing things,...

Life holds many frustrations for left-handed people – from the everyday items designed for right-handers to folklore saying they are in league with the devil. So perhaps it is the result of dealing with such adversity that, according to researchers, they are angrier than the average person. Researchers found that among lefties, the two hemispheres of the brain communicate more with each other so have more interaction with the parts which produce negative emotions.

Left handed people are more affected by fear Left handed people are affected by fear far more than those who are right handed, new research has revealed. By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent 7:15AM BST 01 May 2011 Psychologists found that people who watched an eight minute clip from a scary movie suffered more symptoms associated with post traumatic stress if they were left handed than if they were right handed. When asked to recall events from the film clip, taken from near the tense climax of thriller Silence of the Lambs, left handed volunteers gave more fragmented accounts filled with...

LONDON (Reuters) - A British store is launching a range of underpants for left-handed men, an innovation it says will save them both time and embarrassment in front of the porcelain. The new range, by UK-based Hom, will have a horizontal opening instead of a vertical slit accessed from the right-hand side, breaking a tradition that has lasted for 75 years. "In our view, this is a vital step toward equality for left-handed men," said Rob Faucherand of Debenhams store.

When The Stiletto was but a little penknife, a family member who was a young child during WWII recounted how easily the locals could pick out American spies: When an Americans eats, (s)he holds the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right hands while cutting food, then puts the knife down and switches the fork to the right hand and eats with the tines facing up. Europeans keep the fork in their left hands - with the tines facing down - and push food onto the fork with a knife that is kept in the right...

Left-handed women face higher risk of death Last Updated: 1:54am BST 02/05/2007 Left-handed women are at a higher risk of dying, particularly from cancer and circulatory diseases, a study has suggested. Numerous reports have associated left-handedness with various disorders and, in general, a shorter life span, according to a report by Dutch researchers in the journal Epidemiology. Dr Made K Ramadhani and colleagues from University Medical Centre Utrecht write: "Left-handers are reported to be under-represented in the older age groups, although such findings are still much debated." It is estimated that about one in 10 people is left-handed. The researchers...

A study suggests that women who are left-handed have a higher risk of dying, particularly from cancer and cerebrovascular disease - damage to an artery in the brain or an artery that supplies blood to the brain. While it could be a chance finding and the evidence is far from conclusive, numerous reports have associated left-handedness with various disorders and, in general, a shorter life span, Dutch researchers note in their report in the journal Epidemiology.Early grave? Sexy Hollywood star Angelina Jolie is famously left-handed

Space radiation preferentially destroys specific forms of amino acids, the most realistic laboratory simulation to date has found. The work suggests the molecular building blocks that form the "left-handed" proteins used by life on Earth took shape in space, bolstering the case that they could have seeded life on other planets. Amino acids are molecules that come in mirror-image right- and left-handed forms. But all the naturally occurring proteins in organisms on Earth use the left-handed forms - a puzzle dubbed the "chirality problem". "A key question is when this chirality came into play," says Uwe Meierhenrich, a chemist at...

Throughout history, lefties have had to struggle mightily in a world built for right-handers -- by right handers. Prejudice abounded for centuries. The Roman word for left -- sinistra -- became the English word for sinister. Generations of left-handed schoolchildren were forced to become right-handers and punished when they persisted to write left-handed. Some cultures condemn use of the left hand even today. Medical researchers suggest left-handers are more accident prone, suffer more sports injuries and may die earlier than right-handers, though such conclusions are much debated. On top of all this, most everything made for human hands is designed...