Autistics are up to 40 percent faster at problem-solving than non-autistics, according to a new Université de Montréal and Harvard University study published in Human Brain Mapping. As part of the investigation, participants were asked to complete patterns in the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test that measures hypothesis-testing, problem-solving and learning skills. 

While autism is a common neurodevelopmental disability characterized by profound differences in information processing and analysis, this study showed that autistics have efficient reasoning abilities that build on their perceptual strengths. 

In 1987, Robert Bork became the target of an organized, special interest smear campaign aimed at ruining his chances for being confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice.   Since then, a tit-for-tat approach has made Supreme Court appointments a political football.

These politicized Supreme Court nomination battles have eroded public support of the high Court and a study of public reactions during the Samuel Alito nomination process shows it is only going to get worse.

In a new book, researchers reveal how television advertisements that opposed Alito's nomination in 2005 had a disturbing side effect: Many people who viewed those highly political ads become less supportive of the Supreme Court as an institution.

A completely new species has been discovered in the Russian mountains!

Sorry, it's not Bigfoot or Yeti or Abominable Snowman or Bumble or whatever he is called where you are from, though "Bigfoot Found!" on the cover with a big "No" inside would certainly be a strategy worthy of some other science publications.   

Instead, it is a much more scientific discovery; a plant root.    Professor Hans Cornelissen and his Russian-Dutch team describe this finding in Ecology Letters.

The root belongs to the small alpine plant Corydalis conorhiza and unlike normal roots, which grow into soil, they extend upward through layers of snow. Given this novel behavior, the scientists have termed them 'snow roots'.

We can measure what people prefer and value, but do we know why? And can we predict whether a nation will be liberal or conservative, atheist or religious, polygynous or monogamous?

While researching for a forthcoming article I stumbled upon a paper by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, on the origin of individual values and preferences that indicate that the values of a nation are tied to its IQ.

The article, to be published in the July issue of Journal of Biosocial Science, is a quick read (despite being 20 pages long), and offers one possible explanation of why people have individual values and preferences: the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.

Tomorrow I am traveling to CERN, where I have been invited to give a seminar at a meeting of the LHCb experiment. My talk will discuss the issue of the energy calibration of b-quark jets, a topic to which I have devoted a good part of my research time for the last thirteen years. The talk will of course be centred on the explanation of the analysis Julien Donini and I, together with a few colleagues, performed in CDF a few years ago, the search for Z boson decays to b-quark jet pairs.

Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!

But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then,  deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free Geeks’ Guide to World Domination.

So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.

Email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com. DON'T COMMENT YOUR ANSWERS or you will allow slackers to water down the winner’s pool, thus decreasing your chances of receiving said geek schwag (and you’ll get moderated, deserve a spanking, be summarily executed, etc.).

Researchers here have used sediment from the deep ocean bottom to reconstruct a record of ancient climate dating back more than 500,000 years.   The data were extracted from  the top 65 feet of a 1,312 foot sediment core drilled in 2005 in the North Atlantic Ocean by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

The results provide some new information about the four glacial cycles that occurred during that period.  While climate records from ice cores can show resolutions with individual annual layers, ocean sediment cores are greatly compressed with resolutions sometimes no finer than millennia.

The interstellar stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

Heck and his colleagues examined 22 interstellar grains from the Murchison meteorite for their analysis. Dying sun-like stars flung the Murchison grains into space more than 4.5 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Scientists know the grains formed outside the solar system because of their exotic composition.

Is Internet expression a fundamental right?   Certainly a subset of the modern generation has  demonstrated an irrational sense of entitlement about free content, to the detriment of media companies that have tried to provide it like the New York Times, but parts of copyrighted material have always been allowed under fair use.    What if court interpretation of fair use has changed?

University of Arkansas law professor Ned Snow says current judicial interpretation of fair use, a 150-year-old doctrine that allows people to use copied material in their speech, has become so constricted that it inhibits speech. 

Scientists say they have succeeded in treating immune cells in a way that enables them to inhibit unwanted immune reactions such as organ rejection. Their results have now been published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.

The immune system keeps us healthy: day and night it protects us against invading and harmful pathogens. But this fulltime surveillance can also turn into a problem, for example after an organ transplant. The immune system recognizes the new organ as "foreign" and starts fighting it. In the end, the life-saving transplant will be rejected. Until now, only special drugs have managed to keep the immune system silent and thus inhibit organ rejection.