Sunspots 957

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others* 

Computing: Gizmodo reports that the Biden administration has produced an executive order on artificial intelligence.

Health: NPR reports that the Food and Drug Administration appears to be going to approve the use of a gene editing technique as a treatment for sickle cell disease.

Politics: A Conversation writer discusses the violence of former President Trump's rhetoric.

Science: SciTech Daily has a report on the genetics of skin color in humans.

Phys.org reports on extensive study of the body of sea stars (aka starfish). It turns out that they are mostly head.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 782

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: CNN, and other outlets, report that Crayola will be releasing a "Colors of the World" crayon pack, which attempts to show all of the human skin colors.

Christianity: Christianity Today tells us why the Ascension of Christ was and is important.

Ravi Zacharias, India-born world-wide Christian apologist, passed away, from cancer, on May 19, 2020.

Environment: Gizmodo says that the temperature  was more than 80 degrees F above the Arctic Circle.

Finance: FiveThirtyEight on giving financial aid to the states.

Food: (sort of) Gizmodo reports on a device designed to be touched by the tongue. The user has the sensations she would have, if she were actually tasting something.

Politics: NPR reports that President Trump is claiming that absentee ballots encourage fraud, and that fraud is against Republicans. A number of Republicans, who are in charge of the elections in their states, disagree with him.

NPR fact checks a letter from President Trump to the World Health Organization, and finds it is almost all based on misinformation.

FiveThirtyEight discusses misinformation about COVID-19, in social media. Much such misinformation is put out by bots - automated accounts, perhaps funded by Russia, in an attempt to sow discord in the US.

FiveThirtyEight also points out that state polls are really more important than national ones, because of the way the electoral college works, and assesses the accuracy of state polls. They're pretty accurate -- not perfect, though.

Relevant reports on Twitter insinuations by President Trump, that an employee of a media person he doesn't like was murdered by that media person. With no evidence.

Science: NPR reports that scientists have discovered balls of moss, roughly the size of a baseball, on ice in Alaska. They move -- slowly, and in groups, and they can last for years.


Gizmodo reports that some of us are going to be hearing cicadas in these days. Over a million in an acre, the article says.


The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

Some news about human skin color

A recent report on National Public Radio details new findings in the genetics of human skin color. (The report is in text form, but the page has a link to an audio report, which is a little over seven minutes long. Robert Krulwich, science correspondent, is always interesting to listen to.)

Krulwich interviewed Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist. She believes that human skin color has changed, within groups of humans isolated from each other, because of selection, as such groups migrated North or South. Dark skin color, caused by deposits of melanin in the skin, tends to protect people from excess Ultraviolet light, which may cause skin cancer, and groups who have historically lived near the equator have darker skin than those who have lived further North. On the other hand, having lighter skin allows the person to absorb enough UV light to assist them in manufacturing sufficient vitamin D.

All of this was reasonably well understood before Jablonski's findings. Her research indicates, in addition, that many human lineages have migrated, and, in as little as one or two hundred generations, have changed their skin color from light to dark, or the reverse. For example, the Indians (of Asia), according to Jablonski, are now dark-skinned, but were not always -- they lived further North, and were lighter-skinned. Jablonski believes that humans originated in Africa, where they had darker skins.

Interesting. Thanks for reading.