Prices for Priority Mail, Express Mail and other Shipping Services will change Jan. 2, 2011.

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In addition to an overall price change of 3.5 percent for Priority Mail, new prices for Express Mail, Global Express Guaranteed, Express Mail International, Priority Mail International, Parcel Select and Parcel Return Service will be effective Jan. 2. The overall price change for all Shipping Services products is 3.6 percent.

Source: November 2 Press Release

At this point, I do not plan to pass this increase along to our customers.

Or to put it another way, I do not plan to increase our shipping rates for Priority Mail.

As I understand what I read at the USPS site, they do not plan to increase rates for Media Mail, the shipping option chosen by most of our customers. Yea!

This just in from Nature magazine, of all places.

Not that long ago, biology was considered by many to be a simple science, a pursuit of expedition, observation and experimentation.

Also not that long ago, junk DNA was being defended as an important element of the Darwinian evolution paradigm.

Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was transcribed into RNA2. Much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role; small RNAs of different varieties seem to control gene expression at the level of both DNA and RNA transcripts in ways that are still only beginning to become clear. “Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive,” says Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Source: Evolution News & Views: Exploding the Darwin-Friendly Myth of Junk DNA

Suggested Reading: The Biblical View of Science (Lester E. Showalter; Rod and Staff Publishers)

The founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association says home schooling in Sweden will soon be banned altogether, with a few minor exceptions.

Mike Farris says that Sweden will ban all home schooling except for children with medical exemptions and foreign workers with the appropriate work visas.

“That’s it. People who have religious convictions or are home schooling for religious reasons will not be given one of these very rare exemptions,” he points out. “And so for all intents and purposes, home schooling is going to be banned in Sweden. They’re following the German statute, following the German model.”

In Germany, parents face stiff penalties if they are caught illegally home schooling their children. The Romeike family recently left Germany and is seeking asylum in the U.S. after facing stiff fines and the potential loss of custody rights for home schooling their children. The Home School Legal Defense Association is offering them legal help.

Yeah, I know — that should be in the Old News department. It was supposed to post almost a month ago (on September 4) and somehow got overlooked.