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.

Darwin knew that some mechanism had to govern how our physical features and behavioral traits have evolved over centuries, passing from a parent to their offspring with natural selection favoring those that give the greatest advantage for survival, but he did not have a scientific explanation for this process.

Scientists for decades have believed that differences in the way genes are expressed into functional proteins is what differentiates one species from another and drives evolutionary change but no one has been able to prove it - until now, say researchers at the University of Leeds.

It's two inches long, is shaped like a phallus and is commonly associated with wood.   A middle school joke?  No, it's a new species of stinkhorn mushroom discovered on the African island of Sao Tome and named after Robert Drewes, Curator of Herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences.

Phallus drewesii belongs to a group of mushrooms known as stinkhorns which give off a foul, rotting meat odor. There are 28 other species of Phallus fungi worldwide, but this particular species is notable for its small size, white net-like stem, and brown spore-covered head. It is also the only Phallus species to curve downward instead of upward. 

A team of researchershas discovered a biological marker for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults.  The marker, a receptor known as CCR3, shows strong potential as a means for both the early detection of the disease and for preventive treatment.

Neovascular (or "wet-type") macular degeneration is caused by choroidal neovascularization (CNV) – the invasive growth of new blood vessels in the thin vascular layer that provides nourishment and oxygen to the eye. Central vision loss occurs when these abnormal blood vessels invade the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the inner surface of the eyeball.