Is the cold spot responsible for the CMB North-South asymmetry?
  Several intriguing phenomena, unlikely within the standard inflationary
cosmology, were reported in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from
WMAP and appear to be uncorrelated. Two of these phenomena, termed CMB
anomalies, are representative of their disparate nature: the North-South
asymmetry in the CMB angular-correlation strength, inconsistent with an
isotropic universe, and the cold spot, producing a significant deviation from
Gaussianity. We find a cause-effect relationship between them, at medium
angular scales (l = 11 - 20): we show that a successive diminution of the cold
spot (absolute-value) temperature implies a monotonic decrease of the
North-South asymmetry power, and moreover we find that the cold spot supplies
60% of such power.
