Asymmetric body language in animals
When dogs like someone, their tails wag more to the right, when they don’t, their wagging is mostly to the left, found neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara (University of Triste, Italy) and others in a recent study called "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli." Most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, show some variation of emotional asymmetry in the brain. For humans, the left brain is linked to positive feelings, attachment and love, safety and calm, as well as a slow heart rate. While, the right brain is associated with negative feelings, fear and hate, depression, rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. In broader terms, the left controls behaviors of approach and energy enrichment, the right, withdrawal and energy expenditure. It’s important to note that asymmetries appear on opposite sides of the body, as the left brain controls the right side, the right - the left. So, in reading people’s faces, it is the movements on the right side that reflect happiness, the left - unhappiness. For the tail-wagging experiment, Vallortigara took 30 mixed breed dogs and put them in camera-monitored cages, where they were shown either their owner, an unfamiliar human, a cat, or an unfamiliar, dominant dog. Each instance lasted 90 second, 10 sessions a day for 25 days. As to be expected, the pets’ tails wagged the furthest to the right when they saw their owners, moderately with a human stranger, a little bit with cats, and strongly to the left with aggressive dogs.
This adds to the growing body of evidence that brain asymmetry, once attributed only to humans, is present in most animals. Bees learn better with their right antenna. Chameleons are more likely to change color out of fear when they see someone from their left eye. Chickens look down with their left eye to look for food while keeping the right watching for predators overhead. Chimpanzees, when excited negatively, tend to scratch themselves on the left side. Furthermore, left-handed chimps are more frightened in general by new stimuli than the right-handed, their right brain making them more wary. All this is rather curious, seeing how many languages have some sort of synonimity between right (dexter) and good on the one hand, left (sinister) and bad on the other. It seems on some level, the distinction between the brain hemispheres and their domains has long since been recognized. Sometimes, this manifested in interesting ways, e.g. in the Middle Ages, left-handed people could not become knights, even though, as anyone who has fenced can testify, they would have made exceptional fighters, since not only are most people unaccustomed to fighting the left-handed minority, but the spiral stairs in castle towers are designed to put right-handed attackers at a disadvantage. Also, it would be interesting to look, from a holistic perspective, how physical changes on different sides of the body effect personality and behavior. Because, it seems to me that I’ve been getting more moody and paranoid as vision in my right eye worsened. Could it be the same as with the chameleons? And are pirates portrayed one-eyed for the same reason (it sure isn’t for depth perception)? That would be a whole other study.
If you want to know if Spot loves you so, it’s in his tail, NYTimes.com
In a step forward for freedom of religion, or a step back in the battle against Satan, depending on your perspective, the pentacle has been added to the list of emblems allowed on government-issued military headstones in national cemetaries. A settlement on Monday between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Wiccans calls for pentacle grave markers currently awaited by eleven families nationwide to be placed in the Virginia cemetary within the next 14 days, the agency also agreed to pay $225,000 in lawyer fees. Wicca, sometime referred to as the Old Religion, is a term applied to a vague body of pre-Christian paganism and European witchcraft as popularized by Gerald Gardner in 1954. It focuses mostly around nature worship, with the pentacle representing the five elements: earth, air, water, fire, and spirit. Mystically speaking, the regular pentacle is not an ‘evil’ sign, as it symbolizes spirit being above the other elements, the soul in control of matter. It is when it’s reversed, as is usually found in Satanic ritual, that it becomes unholy, representing the soul being enslaved by base substance. While Wicca is essentially a bitheistic religion, with the God and Goddess forming a complimentary balance, many Wiccans emphasize the Goddess, with certain versions, like feminist Dianic Wicca, eliminating the God altogether. Even in the bitheistic versions, the male part is often portrayed as the Horned God, adding to the Satanic connotations of the religion. Regardless of its incompatibilities with Christianity, which has over a dozen accepted emblems for its various manifestations, Wicca is one of the fastest growing modern religious movements, and to allow emblems for Eckankar, Soka Gakkai Int., and Seicho-No-Ie (their symbol has a swastika!), while rejecting the pentacle, seems like outdated superstition. Now let’s pour libations for the 39th authorized emblem. 
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, celebrated satirist and science-fiction writer, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and over a dozen other novels, many of them best-sellers, died on Wednesday, April 11. Unlike the false death report in January 11, 2000, when Vonnegut fell asleep with a lit cigarette, setting his bed and house on fire, this time, the author really ‘destroyed the universe’, to paraphrase ‘The Book of Bokonon’ from his Cat’s Cradle. His passing was caused by irreversible brain injuries, which he suffered from a fall a few wees ago, tho the details of the fall remain obscure. A counterculture hero, Vonnegut was a humanist, and even served as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, replacing Isaac Asimov, in what he called a "totally functionless capacity". He did not support the current American president, in his last novel, A Man Without a Country, writing that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." Nor did he think anything would change in the 2004 election: "Both candidates were and still are members of the exclusive secret society at Yale, called ‘Skull and Bones.’ That means that, no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones." Of course, we know better than to suggest any kind of conspiracy surrounding the writer’s death. So it goes.