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.

When Albert Einstein constructed his general theory of relativity he decided to resort to some reverse engineering and introduced a 'pressure' term in his equations. The value of this pressure was chosen such that it kept the general relativistic description of the universe stable against the gravitational attraction of the matter filling the universe.

This Memorial Day weekend, it is tradition to visit the graves of our fallen military soldiers – to remember, appreciate, and honor the lives given in service to our nation’s security and freedom. It is humbling to visit a national cemetery and see the thousands of headstones – each representing a life, a story, and a service to our country.

Professor Maria da Graça Bicalho, head of the Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Laboratory at the University of Parana, Brazil, told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics that people with diverse major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) were more likely to choose each other as mates than those whose MHCs were similar, and that this was likely to be an evolutionary strategy to ensure healthy reproduction.

Yes, opposites attract.   Even genetically.  

The MHC is a large genetic region situated on chromosome 6, and found in most vertebrates. It plays an important role in the immune system and also in reproductive success. Apart from being a large region, it is also an extraordinarily diverse one. 

Money does not buy happiness, it is said, and apparently it does not factor much into optimism either.   20 percent of humanity hoards 83 percent of the world's wealth but the vast majority of people, including the 60 percent of the world possessing just 6 percent of world wealth, think the next 5 years will be better for them.

Yes, despite an economic recession, famine, thousands of years without a single day bereft of war somewhere in the world and media reports about a flu epidemic afflicting the Earth, a new study from the University of Kansas and Gallup indicates that humans are optimistic.  Apparently it is just our nature.

70% of you, man or woman, will have an HPV infection at some point in your life.   There is no cure for HPV, just as there is no cure for the common cold and in most people, an HPV infection will clear up on its own, like the common cold.  It can also be passed on to other people during the infection period, like the common cold. 

A new paper in the Arxiv attracted my attention this morning. It is titled "Perturbative QCD effects and the search for a signal at the Tevatron", and is authored by a set of quite distinguished theorists: C.Anastasiou, G.Dissertori, M.Grazzini, F.Stockli, and B.Webber.

How do you reproduce when you lack the genes for reproduction?   Duke University Medical Center researchers want to know also because that can tell a lot about how yeast infections occur.  

In a paper published in Nature, Joseph Heitman, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis in the Duke Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and colleagues report that eight Candida species which have a sexual cycle were missing many of the genes related to reproduction found in other species.   

It appears that some superbugs have evolved to develop the ability to manipulate the immune system - and that can be a good thing, say a team of researchers at The University of Western Ontario.

Some processes that reduce the lethal effects of toxins from superbugs allow humans and microbes to co-evolve, a discovery that may lead to novel alternatives to antibiotics that specifically target the toxic effects of these superbugs.