Amazon Prime subscribers can now borrow ebooks for their devices
Still pondering the relative merits of paying for an Amazon Prime membership? Not sure whether the free expedited shipping and video streaming are worth the price? Well, now the online retailer has added another service to its repertoire: ebook lending.
In an effort to boost sales of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader and Kindle Fire tablet, starting today, customers with a Prime membership will be able to borrow one book at a time from a selection of about 5,000 titles, including some 100 current and former bestsellers, in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. The program is fairly limited; in addition to only being able to borrow one book at a time (if a customer borrows a second book, the first will disappear from their device), borrowers can also only borrow one per month, though they can keep it as long as they like. Borrowed books can also only be accessed via Kindle or Kindle Fire devices, as opposed to purchased ebooks which customers can also read on an iPhone or iPad.
Borrowing ebooks isn't a new concept ? many library systems around the country have been offering ebooks for patrons to check out for a while now. Some publishers are concerned that giving customers the ability to borrow ebooks for free (or as part of a program like Amazon Prime) will harm sales, but others believe that making some books available will entice customers to purchase other titles that might otherwise be overlooked.
[Image credits: Robert Couse-Baker, Joanna Penn]
[via Wall Street Journal]
This article was written by Katherine Gray and originally appeared on Tecca
Today?s LogicBUY Deal is the 17.3? Dell XPS 17 (L702x) Core i7-2670M 2.2GHz Quad Core laptop for $949.99.? Features:? 8GB memory, 750GB 7200rpm hard drive, 1080p LCD, Blu-ray. $1513.99 ? $414 off – $150 coupon code ?= ?$949.99 with free shipping ? This deal expires November 4, 2011 or sooner. Check the above link for [...]
Bugs can be annoying and while most bug zappers aren't terribly expensive, Instructables user Electorials shows off a simple way to make your own that also sucks the bugs in.
The bug zapper is encased in cardboard, with the computer fan operating as a means to suck the bugs into a Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp Inverter (CCFL) pulled out of an old scanner. You'll need to solder some wires together to create the shock, but it doesn't look too difficult. Electorials makes a special note that using cardboard means it's at risk of being flammable, so you need to make sure you leave enough space between the wires when creating it. You'll also want to make sure to stick around when the zapper is in use so nothing goes wrong. Hit up the full Instructables below for the whole guide to making one yourself.
Evolution during human colonizationsPublic release date: 3-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Irene Perovsek 41-078-876-1129 Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The advantage of being there first revealed by an analysis of large genealogies in Quebec
This release is available in French and German.
Most human populations are the product of a series of range expansions having
occurred since modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago to colonize the rest of
the world, but how have these processes influenced today's population diversity? An
international research team led by Damian Labuda at the University of Montreal, Hlne
Vzina from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) and by Laurent Excoffier
from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics have studied
the effects of rapid territorial and demographic expansions on recent human evolution.
Using genealogies including more than one million individuals in a recently colonized
region of Quebec, they show that pioneer individuals on the edge of the colonization
wave had a selective advantage, such that their genes are now predominantly found in
the population. Similar processes are likely to have occurred in other regions of the
world, so that this study suggests that range expansions played a key role in human
evolution. The results of their study are published today in the prestigious journal
Science.
The exact mechanisms of population expansions are difficult to study as they extend over
many generations and hundreds or thousands of years. The expansion of humans into the
Charlevoix Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area of Quebec offered researchers a unique
opportunity to study a range expansion in real time, thanks to the availability of deep and
complete genealogies reconstructed from parish registers. The descending genealogies of all
couples who married in these regions between 1686 and 1960 were reconstructed thanks to
the BALSAC database managed by Hlne Vzina. The analysis of this huge genealogy
including more than one million individuals shows that the genes present in today's population
were mostly transmitted by ancestors who were living on or close to the wave front of the
expansion.
"We knew that the migration of species into new areas promoted the spread of rare
mutations through a phenomenon known as 'gene surfing', but now we find that selection at
the wave front can make this surfing much more efficient. There is thus a long-term
evolutionary success of people living on the edge", Excoffier said.
Women on the wave front had a selective advantage
"We find that families who are at the forefront of a range expansion into new territories had a
greater reproductive success.", Labuda explained. Women on the front of the expansion
indeed married about one year earlier than women in the range core and had 15% more
children and even 20% more married children.
The higher fertility on the wave front is compatible with an increase in resource abundance and
lowered competition among individuals to access these resources. "People could indeed marry
younger as more farm land was available on the wave front than in the core, where good lands
were mostly already occupied", says Excoffier.
Human curiosity, also an inherited trait from past range expansions?
Some human traits others than those the team has measured may have also evolved during
range expansions. More specifically, if there are some traits favoring dispersal and
colonization, it is highly likely that they have also evolved during past range expansions. In
other words, human curiosity and the desire to look over the next mountain or hilltop might be
one of these inherited traits. "It is exciting to see how a study on a regional population of
Quebec can bring insights on human processes that have been going on for thousands of
years. The BALSAC genealogical database is a powerful tool for social and genetic research
and this study is a very nice demonstration of its possibilities", Vzina said.
###
About SIB
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation recognized of
public utility. It federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. Its two-fold mission is
to provide world-class core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life
science research community in key fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology;
as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. It has a longstanding
tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research
community, as well as carefully annotated databases. SIB includes 31 world-class research
and service groups, which gather more than 450 researchers, in the fields of proteomics,
transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary
bioinformatics, modeling, imaging, biophysics, and population genetics in Basel, Bern,
Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich. SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services
are used by life sciences researchers worldwide.
http://www.isb-sib.ch
Contacts:
Laurent Excoffier
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and
University of Bern
Computational and Molecular Population Genetics
Baltzerstrasse 6, 3012 Berne
41-31-631-30-31 / 41-76-389-52-70
Irne Perovsek
Head of Communications
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Quartier Sorge, Btiment Gnopode, 1015 Lausanne
41-21-692-40-54 / 41-78-876-11-29
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Evolution during human colonizationsPublic release date: 3-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Irene Perovsek 41-078-876-1129 Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The advantage of being there first revealed by an analysis of large genealogies in Quebec
This release is available in French and German.
Most human populations are the product of a series of range expansions having
occurred since modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago to colonize the rest of
the world, but how have these processes influenced today's population diversity? An
international research team led by Damian Labuda at the University of Montreal, Hlne
Vzina from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (UQAC) and by Laurent Excoffier
from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics have studied
the effects of rapid territorial and demographic expansions on recent human evolution.
Using genealogies including more than one million individuals in a recently colonized
region of Quebec, they show that pioneer individuals on the edge of the colonization
wave had a selective advantage, such that their genes are now predominantly found in
the population. Similar processes are likely to have occurred in other regions of the
world, so that this study suggests that range expansions played a key role in human
evolution. The results of their study are published today in the prestigious journal
Science.
The exact mechanisms of population expansions are difficult to study as they extend over
many generations and hundreds or thousands of years. The expansion of humans into the
Charlevoix Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area of Quebec offered researchers a unique
opportunity to study a range expansion in real time, thanks to the availability of deep and
complete genealogies reconstructed from parish registers. The descending genealogies of all
couples who married in these regions between 1686 and 1960 were reconstructed thanks to
the BALSAC database managed by Hlne Vzina. The analysis of this huge genealogy
including more than one million individuals shows that the genes present in today's population
were mostly transmitted by ancestors who were living on or close to the wave front of the
expansion.
"We knew that the migration of species into new areas promoted the spread of rare
mutations through a phenomenon known as 'gene surfing', but now we find that selection at
the wave front can make this surfing much more efficient. There is thus a long-term
evolutionary success of people living on the edge", Excoffier said.
Women on the wave front had a selective advantage
"We find that families who are at the forefront of a range expansion into new territories had a
greater reproductive success.", Labuda explained. Women on the front of the expansion
indeed married about one year earlier than women in the range core and had 15% more
children and even 20% more married children.
The higher fertility on the wave front is compatible with an increase in resource abundance and
lowered competition among individuals to access these resources. "People could indeed marry
younger as more farm land was available on the wave front than in the core, where good lands
were mostly already occupied", says Excoffier.
Human curiosity, also an inherited trait from past range expansions?
Some human traits others than those the team has measured may have also evolved during
range expansions. More specifically, if there are some traits favoring dispersal and
colonization, it is highly likely that they have also evolved during past range expansions. In
other words, human curiosity and the desire to look over the next mountain or hilltop might be
one of these inherited traits. "It is exciting to see how a study on a regional population of
Quebec can bring insights on human processes that have been going on for thousands of
years. The BALSAC genealogical database is a powerful tool for social and genetic research
and this study is a very nice demonstration of its possibilities", Vzina said.
###
About SIB
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation recognized of
public utility. It federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. Its two-fold mission is
to provide world-class core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life
science research community in key fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology;
as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. It has a longstanding
tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research
community, as well as carefully annotated databases. SIB includes 31 world-class research
and service groups, which gather more than 450 researchers, in the fields of proteomics,
transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary
bioinformatics, modeling, imaging, biophysics, and population genetics in Basel, Bern,
Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich. SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services
are used by life sciences researchers worldwide.
http://www.isb-sib.ch
Contacts:
Laurent Excoffier
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and
University of Bern
Computational and Molecular Population Genetics
Baltzerstrasse 6, 3012 Berne
41-31-631-30-31 / 41-76-389-52-70
Irne Perovsek
Head of Communications
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Quartier Sorge, Btiment Gnopode, 1015 Lausanne
41-21-692-40-54 / 41-78-876-11-29
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
AMSTERDAM ? Small developing countries are protesting calls by Russia and Japan to delay a global climate change agreement.
The 42-nation Association of Small Island States, countries most threatened by rising sea levels from melting polar ice caps, said an agreement should be concluded next year ? an ambitious target in view of the deep differences that have plagued negotiations for years.
The dispute escalated three weeks before 195 parties convene in South Africa to negotiate less troublesome elements of a climate deal.
Negotiators from Japan and Russia have been quoted as saying an overall climate agreement by 2015 is unrealistic.
A statement from the island countries Thursday said that position was "environmentally reckless and politically irresponsible."
Animal Kings: Ants, like these workers carrying eggs to a plant's leaf after rain flooded their nest, have a combined biomass estimated in the billions of tons.
The revelation this week that the Earth now holds 7 billion people, according to the U.N.'s population division, prompted a question: Who else is in the 7 Billion Club? To find out which other animals had reached that plateau, we asked wildlife experts ? and they patiently explained why our innocent question was nearly impossible to answer.
But then the experts gave us some best guesses. And the consensus was that humans are the largest animals on the planet to have a population numbering at least 7 billion ? but they're certainly not the only ones to reach that mark.
More on that in a minute ? but first, let's start with the basic premise.
?
It's very difficult to say with certainty, "Right now, there are 7 billion humans living on Earth." Because, as our colleague Adam Cole explained in his video and audio report, for every new drop in the bucket, there's always a drop or two leaking out of it.
In fact, the U.N.'s choice of Oct. 31 as The Day We Hit 7 Billion comes with some caveats ? as Mark reported, the margin of error on the estimate totaled around 56 million.
And the date announced by the U.N. doesn't match up with what the U.S. Census Bureau predicts. On its own version of a World Population tracker, the U.S. agency estimates that humans won't hit the 7 billion mark until March 2012.
So, there's some unavoidable uncertainty here ? questions of scale and logistics make it impossible to count 7 billion people who are all alive at the same instant.
And if you can't count humans, then how could you expect to count rodents or birds? The most challenging of all may be the fish. Because if a fish holds still long enough for you to count it, that might be because it has just died ? and can no longer be counted. You see where this is going.
So, the experts do what they do better than anyone: They estimate ? and they calculate biomass.
For those of you who are rusty on your ecology, biomass is determined by multiplying an estimated population by its members' average weight. So, for humans, our experts settled on approximately 350 million tons ? or 7 billion x 50 kg (110 pounds). And if that number seems lighter than you'd think, consider that the estimate must take children's lighter weights into account.
After contacting several experts from the World Wildlife Fund and David Kidd at London's Global Population Dynamics Database, here's the rough consensus that we came up with:
Among land-based vertebrates, humanity's closest rivals in terms of sheer numbers are probably the brown rat (which, everyone agrees, outnumber us ? but no one seems eager to count) and the domestic chicken (which numbered 18.6 billion in 2009, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization).
And in terms of animals whose bodies are around the size of a human's, WWF International consultant Jonathan Loh, an honorary research associate at the Zoological Society of London, wrote us to say:
"No other large mammal comes close to us in terms of numbers. According to the FAO, there are around 1.4 billion cattle in the world and about 1.1 billion sheep (in 2009). The total cattle biomass would be greater than ours (more than 500 million tons), but sheep biomass would be considerably less (below 100 million tons)."
Loh was kind enough to provide data for a chart. While it doesn't pretend to be an exhaustive survey of species with large populations, it does give a sense of the range of life on Earth ? and how different populations compare to one another.
Species
Population
Biomass (million tons)
Bacteria total
4 quadrillion quadrillion
1,000,000
Ants (many species)
10 billion billion
3,000
Marine fish (many species)
800-2,000
Cattle (Bos taurus)
1.4 billion
520
Termites (many species)
445
Humans (Homo sapiens)
7 billion
350
Antarctic krill (Euphausia suberba)
500 trillion
150
Sheep (Ovis aries)
1.1 billion
65
Domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus)
18.6 billion
40
Great whales (10 species)
3 million
20
Elephants (2 species)
0.5 million
2
Update at 12:40 p.m. ET: We've adjusted the chart for clarity, because the totals we found for plants and animals were measured by dry carbon weight. Unlike the above measurements, they did not include water and other elements. Here are those totals, in units of million tons:
Terrestrial plants: 560,000
Marine plants: 5-10,000
Terrestrial animals: 5,000
Thank you to the alert readers who pointed out this potential cause for confusion. Our original post continues:
Among all animals, ants outweigh us in biomass ? putting billions and billions of tons up against humans' fewer than 500 million. And while they're both tiny and lacking a backbone, krill are the champs among animals worldwide, in terms of numbers, with a population estimated at 500 trillion.
We asked researchers at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., for their opinion ? and for details about animals with large populations. The WWF scientists said that among birds, the most populous species is believed to be the red-billed Quelea; among fish, the Peruvian Anchoveta gets at least one expert's vote.
"Elephants don't come close to us: There are about half a million of them, so they would weigh in at a couple of million tons" of biomass, Loh says.
So, we've got the elephants beat. But lest we humans start getting full of ourselves for numbering 7 billion, one WWF expert reminds us, "The passenger pigeon used to number an estimated 3-5 billion, and look what happened ... that should send us all a warning!"
And to be sure we got the point, another added, "Of course, within each human there are animals. So, our own parasites must outnumber us."
EnlargeJanice Haney Carr/AP
Oh, The Bacteria: A colorized electron micrograph image from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a large grouping of Gram-negative Legionella pneumophila bacteria. There are quadrillions of bacteria in the world, far surpassing humanity's 7 billion.
Janice Haney Carr/AP
Oh, The Bacteria: A colorized electron micrograph image from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a large grouping of Gram-negative Legionella pneumophila bacteria. There are quadrillions of bacteria in the world, far surpassing humanity's 7 billion.
Alexandru Lungu is listed at 360 lbs., nearly 100 over the upper limit of heavyweights as governed by the unified rules of MMA here in the U.S. There is not much of a chance that American fight fans will see him fight locally any time soon. In the meantime, we can only enjoy him through the magic of YouTube.
There is much to enjoy from Saturday's bout in Romania against Chris Mahle. Lungu's walk-in involves the pelt of a wolf-esque animal and a sword, he has excellent takedown defense and a good headlock, and he ended the fight with what was best described as a "boob choke."
It is officially listed as an arm triangle, but I didn't spot an arm in. It appeared to be all chest. Do you think we'll see a choke like that in Brock Lesnar and Alistair Overeem's bout at UFC 141?
Bugs can be annoying and while most bug zappers aren't terribly expensive, Instructables user Electorials shows off a simple way to make your own that also sucks the bugs in.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tpb7ZHNaOOiqOT38g5H_HqgLGIQ3Gdt7G291rAG3o5C_LEIRxZpR2E-JUoopThkVFtDL_aeiWWiqpKVEJlRGGBGXXGiPrHldSUzIMzO_U=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 3-Nov-2011
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