Almost like some form of karmic retribution for my comments about the imminent swamping of New Orleans,
here comes this news as I'm nursing a forehead, nose, and neck sunburn from Saturday morning's Kali workshop.
WASHINGTON - Redheads sunburn easily, but that may not be the only reason they are at high risk of skin cancer. New research suggests the pigment that colors their skin may set them up for cancer-spurring sun damage even if they do not burn.
More than 1 million Americans develop some form of skin cancer each year. Among those most at risk are people with light skin, hair and eyes, a combination frequent in redheads. They are particularly prone to sunburns, a risk factor for anyone, especially if the burns occur in childhood.
Scientists long have wondered if something else plays a role in redheads' high risk. One theory focuses on melanin, the skin pigment that darkens with sun exposure to provide either a tan or freckles. People with red hair have a chemically different type of melanin than people with dark hair.
Duke University researchers on Sunday reported the first direct evidence that those melanin differences indeed may be a culprit. It turns out that redheads' melanin is more vulnerable to a type of DNA-damaging stress from the sun's ultraviolet rays.
As a kid I had reddish blonde hair, and in some summertime photos it's completely blonde, since the sun would actually leech the red out over a long summer of regular sun exposure. I actually used to go to the beach at least once a week, skateboard for hours every day, play non hat-based sports (soccer), all the time, etc. All of which was probably enough to ensure eventual malignant skin tumors, no mattr how much of my time I now spend indoors, guarding my precious, away from the sun, which burnses us.
At times it certainly does seem that humans are uniquely unsuited to live on this planet. It's almost enough to make you believe in something other than evolution, though the alternative based on the evidence of human fraility is that we were designed by an exceedingly stupid god. Perhaps one of those blind idiot ones the pipers are always playing to in Lovecraft's stories, what with all of our tooth decay, appendixes, easily-broken bones, high female mortality rate during childbirth, skinny and vulnerable necks, poor range of vision, lack of claws or teeth or poison for defense and hunting, and so on.
I've always thought that the more you know about the human body (I know little, but even my knowledge is sufficient for some conclusions.) the more obvious it becomes that we evolved from lower species, and that we're clearly an amazing distance from perfected now. We just lucked into big brains, in comparison to all of the other stupid animals on this planet, and those were enough to let us overcome our endless other physical deficiencies.
