Month: June 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a nice offer for those who've been interested in trying out Apple Music or just want to wring out a few free months of music streaming. As of this writing, Best Buy is offering six months of service to new subscribers of Apple's Spotify rival at no cost. If you're a returning subscriber, meanwhile, you'll get five months for free. Apple normally provides a one-month free trial to new users before charging a $10 monthly fee, so this deal works out to a $50 discount in total.

You'll need to supply Best Buy with an email address to redeem the offer, and, sadly, the deal doesn't apply to current Apple Music subscribers. Once you activate the extended trial, your subscription will be set to auto-renew by default, but the Dealmaster can confirm that you're able to turn that off in your account settings without losing access to the free months of service. It took about five minutes for Best Buy to email us a redemption code after putting in an order, so don't be alarmed if you don't receive the deal immediately after purchase.

We covered the pros and cons of Apple Music in our guide to the best Spotify alternatives earlier this year. Compared to its biggest competitor, Apple's service tends to put more emphasis on music curation by actual people. It's not devoid of algorithm-based recommendations by any means, but in general, Spotify's are better-tuned. Apple's approach could be good or bad depending on how in tune you feel Spotify is with your taste, but either way, both services have a massive music library that you can sort into playlists and listen to à la carte as you please. Unlike Spotify, Apple doesn't offer a free tier to fall back on, but it can integrate music you may already own (on iTunes) with its streaming library, and it offers higher-quality audio with some content (for now, at least). Naturally, it's also more tightly integrated with other Apple products—here's looking at you, HomePod owners—though it has apps for both iOS and Android.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a nice offer for those who've been interested in trying out Apple Music or just want to wring out a few free months of music streaming. As of this writing, Best Buy is offering six months of service to new subscribers of Apple's Spotify rival at no cost. If you're a returning subscriber, meanwhile, you'll get five months for free. Apple normally provides a one-month free trial to new users before charging a $10 monthly fee, so this deal works out to a $50 discount in total.

You'll need to supply Best Buy with an email address to redeem the offer, and, sadly, the deal doesn't apply to current Apple Music subscribers. Once you activate the extended trial, your subscription will be set to auto-renew by default, but the Dealmaster can confirm that you're able to turn that off in your account settings without losing access to the free months of service. It took about five minutes for Best Buy to email us a redemption code after putting in an order, so don't be alarmed if you don't receive the deal immediately after purchase.

We covered the pros and cons of Apple Music in our guide to the best Spotify alternatives earlier this year. Compared to its biggest competitor, Apple's service tends to put more emphasis on music curation by actual people. It's not devoid of algorithm-based recommendations by any means, but in general, Spotify's are better-tuned. Apple's approach could be good or bad depending on how in tune you feel Spotify is with your taste, but either way, both services have a massive music library that you can sort into playlists and listen to à la carte as you please. Unlike Spotify, Apple doesn't offer a free tier to fall back on, but it can integrate music you may already own (on iTunes) with its streaming library, and it offers higher-quality audio with some content (for now, at least). Naturally, it's also more tightly integrated with other Apple products—here's looking at you, HomePod owners—though it has apps for both iOS and Android.

Enlarge / The genetic code. Note that a lot of the amino acids (the outer layer, in grey) are encoded by several sets of three-base codes that share the first two letters. (credit: Wikipedia)

Mutations are the raw ingredient of evolution, providing variation that sometimes makes an organism more successful in its environment. But most mutations are expected to be neutral and have no impact on an organism's fitness. These can be incredibly useful since these incidental changes help us track evolutionary relationships without worrying about selection for or against the mutation affecting its frequency. All of the genetic ancestry tests, for example, rely heavily on tracking the presence of these neutral mutations.

But this week, a paper provided evidence that a significant category of mutations isn't as neutral as we thought they were. The big caveat is that the study was done in yeast, which is a weird organism in a couple of ways, so we'll have to see if the results hold in others.

True neutral?

One of the reasons that most mutations are neutral is that most of our DNA doesn't seem to be doing anything useful. Only a few percent of the human genome is composed of the portion of genes that encode proteins, and only some of the nearby DNA is involved in controlling the activity of those genes. Outside of those regions, mutations don't do much, either because the DNA there has no function or because the function isn't very sensitive to having a precise sequence of bases in the DNA.