Figuring out magazine subscriptions in the iPad age
After being actively courted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, several magazine publishers have launched digital versions of titles like Wired, Popular Science, Time, and People targeted toward iPad owners. Most of these digital versions include more than just text and pictures—some offer video and audio, others include interactive diagrams. While consumers seem to like the idea of carrying interactive magazines around in one compact device (not unlike the appeal e-books have), they have mostly balked at paying premium prices for each individual issue. Time Inc. has reached a deal with Apple to allow regular print subscribers access to issues for free, but the compromise still leaves room for improvement.Most digital magazines consist of a "container" reader app that offers access to individual issues via in-app purchasing. These typically sell for $3-5 per issue. But reading through the reviews on most such apps, it's clear that many readers don't relish ponying up cash for each issue. In some cases the digital version is more expensive than the dead-tree version on newsstands, and in all cases is significantly more expensive than typical subscription rates.
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Amazon, droughts driving drop in plants' ability to store carbon
Most of the focus of climate policy has been on efforts to cut down on the carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere, either by limiting emissions in the first place, or by capturing and storing it. But the Earth itself already does a lot of the latter for us: roughly 60 percent of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere gets taken up by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. That has led to worries that land use changes and rising temperatures themselves might start inhibiting the natural carbon sinks. A study published in yesterday's issue of Science provides some evidence that this may be taking place: droughts over the past decade have caused the amount of CO2 taken up by land plants to drop. The authors of the new paper focus on a figure called "net primary production," or NPP, which acts as a measure of the growth of terrestrial plant biomass. It's possible to estimate NPP using spectroscopic data obtained from satellites, and the authors use a 10-year record obtained from an instrument aboard NASA's Terra mission. Since plants grow by removing CO2 from the atmosphere, the changes in vegetation revealed by NPP should provide some measure of how effectively the planet's surface is sequestering carbon.
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Meditation boosts part of brain where ADD, addictions reside
Spending some time meditating may improve the integrity and efficiency of certain connections in the brain, according to a new study. When a group of participants meditated regularly over the course of a month, brain scans showed increased nerve connections in the areas that govern reward processing and decision making. The authors of the study hope this particular kind of meditation can be adapted to help those conditions with manifestations in the same area of the brain, such as ADD, addiction, and dementia.In the experiment, a small group of college students were instructed to do integrative body-mind training, or IBMT, in half-hour chunks for a total of 11 hours during one month. The IBMT involved a combination of activities, including body relaxation, mental imagery, and mindfulness training accompanied by specific kinds of music.
Compared to a control group that underwent only relaxation training, brain scans of the students who meditated for a total of at least 11 hours during the month had slightly increased connections in the white matter that connects the anterior cingulate cortex to the rest of the brain; by some measures, these connections were also more robust. The ACC processes decisions, conflicts, and rewards, and deficits in that area have been linked to ADD, depression, dementia, addictions, and schizophrenia.
While the study was small in scale, the authors hope that the training might eventually be used for therapy or intervention for these conditions, as well as a general way of making people less impatient, greedy, and anxious. The experiment's results also serve as a small probe into the nature of brain plasticity, one that the researchers hope to build upon in the future.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011043107 (About DOIs).
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