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Wallamba Island is transformed from a dairy farm into a wildlife refuge; we cuddle camels at Gympie; make art from fruit and veg boxes; and check out a working dog challenge.

The lush, deep-red Siamese rosewood is so desirable people risk their lives to get it — Thailand.

South Africa’s largest manufacturer of printed circuits has beaten frequent power outages and cut its energy costs by deploying Australian-designed Redflow zinc-bromine flow batteries.

Scottish Power says electric cars and a shift to electric heating could mean a big rise in demand for electricity.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 28 September 1917

Though the Food Controller may consider that the supply of fresh-water fish is not of great importance, the cormorants evidently hold a different opinion. There were two busily sampling what they could catch on one of the Delamere meres; they thought a big, lazy bream well worth diving for. Was it this idea which attracted a passing shag – the smaller and much rarer green cormorant – to see what it could find on the canal near Mossley? Probably it was either lost or fagged out when migrating, for it allowed itself to be caught, and when I last heard of it, three days ago, was thriving well in captivity. The big cormorant often wanders inland for a little fishing, but the shag is seldom met with far from the sea.

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Southpaws seem to be more common among cats and dogs than humans. Eric Isselee/Shutterstock.com

This is an article from I’ve Always Wondered, a series where readers send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. Send your question to alwayswondered@theconversation.edu.au

While watching my cat engaging in yet another battle with my shoelace, I noticed that he seemed mainly to use his left front paw. Do animals have a more dextrous side that they favour for particular tasks, just like humans? – Mike, Perth.

The short answer is: yes they do! Like humans, many animals tend to use one side of the body more than the other. This innate handedness (or footedness) is called behavioural or motor laterality.

The term laterality also refers to the primary use of the left or right hemispheres of the brain. The two halves of the animal brain are not exactly alike, and each hemisphere differs in function and anatomy. In general terms, the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere controls the left side.

Laterality is an ancient inherited characteristic and is widespread in the animal kingdom, in both vertebrates and invertebrates. Many competing theories (neurological, biological, genetic, ecological, social and environmental) have been proposed to explain how the phenomenon developed, but it remains largely a mystery.

Animal ‘handedness’

Humans tend to be right-handed. Lefties or “southpaws” make up only about 10% of the human population, and more males than females are left-handed.

Great apes show similar handedness patterns to humans. Most chimps, for instance, seem to be right-handed. But not many studies have looked at laterality in non-primate animals.

Read more: Why are most people right-handed? The answer may be in the mouths of our ancestors.

There is some evidence to suggest that dogs and cats can be right- or left-pawed, although the ratio seems to be more evenly split than in humans, and it is unclear whether there are sex differences.

If you’re a pet owner you can do an experiment for yourself. Which paw does your cat or dog lead with when reaching out for something, or to tap open a pet door?

To test your pet dog, you can place a treat-filled Kong toy directly in front of your dog and see which paw he or she uses to hold it to get the food out. A dog may use either paw or both paws.

To test your pet cat, you can set a “food puzzle” by putting a treat inside a glass jar and watching to see which paw your cat uses. Don’t forget to repeat it lots of times and take notes to see whether the effect is real or just random chance!

Don’t forget to repeat the experiment lots of times.

Horses also seem to prefer to circle in one direction rather than the other. Meanwhile, one study suggests that kangaroos are almost exclusively lefties, although the neural basis for this is unknown.

Lateralisation and brain function

In humans, the left hemisphere is mainly associated with analytical processes and language and the right hemisphere with orientation, awareness and musical abilities, although this dichotomy is simplistic at best.

Is there evidence of lateralised brain function in non-human animals too? A team of Italian researchers think so. They found that dogs wag their tails to the right when they see something they want to approach, and to the left when confronted with something they would rather avoid. This suggests that, just as for people, the right and left halves of the brain do different jobs in controlling emotions.

Laterality is also connected to the direction in which hair grows (so-called stuctural laterality), or even to the senses (sensory laterality). Many animals use they left eye and left ear (indicating right brain activation) more often than the right ones when investigating objects that are potentially frightening. However, asymmetries in olfactory processing (nostril use) are less well understood.

Research suggests most kangaroos are southpaws. Ester Inbar/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The left or right bias in sensory laterality is separate from that of motor laterality (or handedness). However, some researchers think that side preference is linked to the direction of hair whorls (“cow licks”), which can grow in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction. More right-handed people have a clockwise hair pattern, although it is unclear if this is true of other animals.

The direction of hair growth and handedness are also related to temperament. Left-handed people might be more vulnerable to stress, as are left-pawed dogs and many other animals. In general, many animals, including humans, that have a clockwise hair whorl are less stress-prone than those with anticlockwise hair growth. The position of the hair whorl also matters; cattle and horses with hair whorls directly above the eyes are more typically difficult to handle than those with whorls lower down on the face.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, snails also have a form of laterality, despite having a very different nervous system to vertebrates like us. Their shells spiral in either a “right-handed” or “left-handed” direction – a form of physical asymmetry called “chirality”. This chirality is inherited – snails can only mate with matching snails.

Chirality is even seen in plants, depending on the asymmetry of their leaves, and the direction in which they grow.

As an aside, left-handedness has been discriminated against in many cultures for centuries. The Latin word sinistra originally meant “left” but its English descendant “sinister” has taken on meanings of evil or malevolence. The word “right”, meanwhile, connotes correctness, suitability and propriety. Many everyday objects, from scissors to notebooks to can-openers, are designed for right-handed people, and the Latin word for right, dexter, has given us the modern word “dextrous”.

Why is the brain lateralised?

One adaptive advantage of lateralisation is that individuals can perform two tasks at the same time if those tasks are governed by opposite brain hemispheres. Another advantage might be resistance to disease – hand preference in animals is associated with differences in immune function, with right-handed animals mounting a better immune response.

Does it matter if your cat, dog, horse or cow favours one paw (or hoof) over another? Determining laterality – or which side of the brain dominates the other – could change the way domestic animals are bred, raised, trained and used, including predicting which puppies will make the best service dogs, and which racehorses will race better on left- or right-curving tracks.

And even if your dog or cat never clutches a pen, or uses one limb more than the other, just be grateful that they haven’t yet developed opposable thumbs!

This article is dedicated to the memory of Bollo the cat, who inspired this question but has since passed away.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Judges has to choose between 3,800 entries from all over the world.

India was once home to 100,000 rice varieties, but high-yield, less hardy hybrids have taken over encouraging farmers to safeguard more resistant strains

India is rice country: the cereal provides daily sustenance for more than 60% of the population. Half a century ago, it was home to more than 100,000 rice varieties, encompassing a stunning diversity in taste, nutrition, pest-resistance and, crucially in this age of climate change and natural disasters, adaptability to a range of conditions.

Today, much of this biodiversity is irretrievably lost, forced out by the quest for high-yield hybrids and varieties encouraged by government agencies. Such “superior” varieties now cover more than 80% of India’s rice acreage.

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Health minister responds to Abbott’s hint that his party kept him from scrapping the RET, saying 33,000GwH was the minimum the Senate would accept

Tony Abbott wasn’t kept from reducing the renewable energy target by his colleagues while he was leader, one of his former ministers has claimed, despite the former prime minister appearing to point the finger at his own party.

Abbott reignited the Coalition’s energy debate last week, by going on the attack against any further move by the Turnbull government towards renewables, threatening to cross the floor if it headed towards the “unconscionable” direction of encouraging further investment in the renewable market.

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Let’s banish bleach – it really isn’t a healthy way to clean the loo, and there are perfectly good green alternatives

It seems obvious that exposure to powerful cleaning products, including bleach, isn’t ideal, but now there’s powerful evidence of just how harmful they can be.

Using them just once a week could increase a person’s chances of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by nearly a third, according to a recent 30-year study from Harvard University and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. This isn’t the first time a link has been shown between serious health problems and everyday spray products. The culprit used to be phosphates, once the heroes of gleam, and omnipresent in laundry and dishwasher detergent. But in water, phosphates caused toxic bacteria growth. They were stopped, primarily by us – revolting consumers (in every sense).

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Alexander Blanco's conservation work is helping to save the world's most powerful eagle.

New Forest Octopus-like tentacles are stained with what appears to be congealed blood and there’s a stink of rotting flesh

Naturalists need good contacts, and generalists such as me depend on observant friends to pass the word when they see anything that might be of interest. A phone call alerted me. My friend had spotted a photographer at work, and enquired what he was taking. He had been tipped off that there was a rare fungus nearby and had come to get some pictures of it. Jeremy thought I should know.

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Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food

The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.

Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.

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A new book tells the story of farmers embracing 'regenerative agriculture' to return health to the soil, while increasing their profitability. Solar and sustainability values put an off-grid Tasmanian winery on the tourist and Tesla map, while a trial of off-grid power in a WA farming community shows positive results.

Wallamba Island is transformed from a dairy farm into a wildlife refuge; we cuddle camels at Gympie; make art from fruit and veg boxes; and check out a working dog challenge.

The near-6,000 sq km block of ice known as A-68 looks finally to be on the move.

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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A selection of the best photographs from around the word including Milan fashion, the autumn equinox and some herdsmen in lederhosen

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Decaying notebooks discovered in an abandoned research station contain a treasure trove of tree growth data dating from 1930s

A cache of decaying notebooks found in a crumbling Congo research station has provided unexpected evidence with which to help solve a crucial puzzle – predicting how vegetation will respond to climate change.

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A rare rhinoceros under constant protection, an albino orangutan, and protected pandas are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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