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.

With school budgets already sub-par, and the purse strings futher tightened in this current economic state, teachers have to find ways to do more with less. One suggestion, if I may, is to combine chemistry and history. Checking off the list of U.S. presidents while also teaching children about the periodic table is a great way to kill two birds with one stone, and who knows, it may even help retention of each subject.

(I use U.S. presidents as one example; you could easily apply the venerable Table to a whole host of subjects.) 

Let's start easy.

I awoke early this morning, confused in my half-asleep stupor as to why the neighbors were rolling the garbage cans up and down the driveway while at the same time the nearby naval air station was staging extremely low-flying drills about 10 feet from the roof.

After I ruled out the garbage can theory (garbage day is Wednesday, so that would just be silly) and I didn't see Maverick and Goose buzzing the house tower, I thought, "Is that thunder?" It couldn't be - I'd never heard thunder like that, and I grew up in the upper midwest where tornadoes are the only relief from mosquitoes.

But it was.

The media is a powerful teacher of children and adolescents, an editorial in JAMA says. But what are they learning, and how can it be modified? "When children and adolescents spend more time with media than they do in school or in any leisure-time activity except for sleeping, much closer attention should be paid to the influence media has on them."

Editorial author Victor C. Strasburger writes: