In the small hilly Indian state of Meghalaya, a matrilineal system operates with property names and wealth passing from mother to daughter rather than father to son - but some men are campaigning for change.

He is quick to assure me that he and his colleagues “do not want to bring women down,” as he puts it. “We just want to bring the men up to where the women are.”

“The same is true of many of the nouns in our language. When something becomes useful, its gender becomes female.

Mary tells me that women do not trust men to look after their money so they take control of it themselves. I glance at Alfred for a response but he musters only a smile.

Heh, upside down society.

My research already meant I could prove that a huge gulf existed between Hitler’s claims and the reality of how most of the men in his unit actually experienced the war. I had enough evidence to lift the cloud of secrecy that Nazi propagandists had put over Hitler’s war years. Enough to develop my argument that Hitler was, in fact, not ‘made’ by the First World War, that he returned from the war still a man with fluctuating political ideas of the Left and Right, and that lying about his war years was central to his rise to power.

A politician lying about his armed service. What a shocking revelation!

A study recently compared the positions of 50 recognizable points on the skulls of dogs and compared them to each other and other members of the order Carnivora. There was as much variety in the shape of the skulls of dogs as in the entire rest of the order, and the extremes were further apart.

What does that mean, exactly? It means that the differences between the skulls of that Pug and Great Dane I mentioned before (on R) are greater than the differences between the skulls of a weasel and a walrus. Much of the variation in dogs is outside the range of the rest of the order, meaning their shapes are entirely unique. In just a couple centuries, our choices have created unbelievable variety in the heads of dogs - more than 60 million years has created in the rest of the carnivores.

[..] But the last group of Moscow’s dogs is by far the most amazing. They are the beggars, for obvious reasons. In these packs, the alpha isn’t the best hunter or strongest, it’s the smartest. The most impressive beggars, however, get their own title: ‘metro dogs’. They rely on scraps of food from the daily commuters who travel the public transportation system. To do so, the dogs have learned to navigate the subway. They know stops by name, and integrate a number of specific stations into their territories.

[..] Beggars are rarely hit by cars, as they have learned to cross the streets when people do. They’ve even been seen waiting for a green light when no pedestrians are crossing, suggesting that they have actually learned to recognize the green walking man image of the crosswalk signal.

Christie Wilcox. Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs. ScienceBlogs.

Naegleria gruberi grows a pair of flagella when under stress. But unlike a sperm tail, it puts these appendages out front, and swims by breast stroke. The organism is stained to emphasize its anatomy.

So here I’m reading this short article about an amoeba that can push out “arms” and start swimming, get to the end and read this awesome bit:

Fritz-Laylin is fascinated by Naegleria because she’s trying to understand how complex cells evolved. But there may be a practical payoff, as well. Naegleria gruberi has a malicious cousin, named fowleri, that causes a rare human disease.

“It’s pretty, pretty nasty. If you’re swimming in water that has a lot of Naegleria fowleri and you happen to get some water up your nose, what can happen is they crawl along your olfactory [nerve fibers], so they basically go into your nose, into your brain and eat your brain. And you’re dead pretty quickly.”

Richard Harris. Oddball Amoebas Sprout Arms When Stressed. NPR.

Leave my brains alone, I’m saving it for the zombies. :(