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""After year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly no longer has same DNA as identical twin," the headline of a story on the Today Show's website, published Thursday, declared. Seven percent of his DNA, the story says, "has not returned to normal since he returned from space." Pretty amazing news, right? Too bad it's not true. This week, dozens of news organizations published stories with this or similar information. They cited a NASA study on the effects of space travel on the human body, with two subjects: astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly, identical twins. In 2015, Scott flew to the International Space Station and lived there for 340 days-a record for an American astronaut-while Mark stayed on Earth. Scientists examined the twins before, during, and after the mission. While the study certainly detected some interesting changes in Scott after his return, space did not alter 7 percent of Scott's DNA, the genetic code found in the cells in our bodies that makes us what we are. What the NASA study found was that some of Scott's genes changed their expression while he was in space, and 7 percent of those genes didn't return to their pre-flight states months after he came back. If 7 percent of Scott's genetic code changed, as some of the stories suggested, he'd come back an entirely different species."

"From Baton Rouge to Minneapolis to Dallas, it has been a fraught week in the United States. Tonight, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Sut Jhally is speaking at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts about race relationships in America. Jhally is the founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation. He is best known for producing and directing films on politics, violence and social issues. Jhally spoke with WAMC about how he thinks the election of Barack Obama affected racial identity in the United States. The lecture is titled "The Crisis of Whiteness in the Age of the Black Presidency." It is free and open to the public."

"Coca-Cola's "It's Beautiful" ad, that aired during Sunday night's Super Bowl, sought to portray ethnic diversity in the U.S. by featuring "America the Beautiful" sung in several languages. The many different kinds of people in the ad - Hispanics, cowboys, Muslims, Jews and Asians - were all implicitly united by their identity as "American." But not everyone was happy with Coke's celebration of diversity in the country. After the ad was aired, Twitter lit up with commentary  under various hashtags (such as #SpeakAmerican) critical of the company. Some commenters found it disrespectful to sing "America the Beautiful" in any language other than English, while others said immigrants need to learn English to live in the United States."

"From NSA sweeps to commercial services scraping our Web browsing habits, to all kinds of people tracking us through our smartphones, Angwin says we've become a society where indiscriminate data-gathering has become the norm. Angwin has covered online privacy issues for years, and in her new book she describes what she did to try to escape the clutches of data scrapers, even to the point of creating a fake identity."

"Growing numbers of observers contend that the dominant public role of our time has shifted from citizen to consumer. Indeed, respondents in polls typically cite entertainment, shopping, and other consumer activities as their top free time preferences. Commercial media and public entertainment venues offer environments carefully constructed to avoid politics and real world problems that might disturb these consumer impulses. As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups. Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the "walled gardens" of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention. "

"Michael Brennan, who founded the award-winning safeguarding platform tootoot, was himself a victim of cyberbullying at school. "There were too many barriers for me to speak up, especially in high school. It was all happening on places like Bebo and MySpace, where there was no way to tackle it. So, I vowed to find a solution to the problem." Since Michael launched tootoot in 2014, the reporting app has worked with more than 1,000 British schools, with over 400,000 children registered on the platform. Children can log in and report problematic messages to their school or local council, and are assigned a unique number when they log in to report bullying. Schools can keep track of how many times an individual child has experienced bullying, build a chronology, and identify patterns on a dashboard. If they feel it's necessary, they can click to reveal the identity of a child reporting bullying."

"However, when considering our current fixation on representation, I have to wonder if we have overlooked other meaningful ways of being represented, those that can be pinpointed only in life experiences and emotional phenomenon beyond the visible self. When I think of all the "black art" being ushered in by this new era, I feel conflicted. As a black person, I enjoy seeing artists whose careers are finally being given due praise and whose voices are at last being amplified. However, a question arises of what it means to be truly represented. Is it enough to look like the artist if you do not recognize yourself in the art? And yet there is nothing simple about it. Representation is such a complicated issue because on the surface it presents itself as a politically correct, objective good for all of society. For those being represented, it plays to a collective sense of pride and personal vanity. It feels good to see ourselves and know that people in our communities are being paid to craft their own narratives. Representation also presents the opportunity for other communities, which might have otherwise stereotyped or discriminated against us, to see our humanity and acknowledge our worth in the art we produce. However, while representation may be a praiseworthy standard for creative industries, it cannot be the bench mark against which we measure good art. Good art must do more than reflect our own images back at us. It must move us to a place beyond our obsession with identity, sense of tribalism and fear of others."

"How can parents get children the support they might need while keeping in mind that adolescence is, by definition, a time of identity exploration?"

"THE CONCEPTS OF "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings," hotly debated on college campuses for years, are now reaching high schools too. It's easy enough to say that college students are supposed to have their assumptions challenged daily, even if that sometimes means experiencing discomfort. But the question of what high school students should be exposed to, and protected from, feels murkier in 2018. Today's high school students are more precocious, more politically engaged, more tuned in to their gender identities and nascent sexuality. They are already flooded with uncensored, unedited information, 24 hours a day: What would a safe space even look like for a 16-year-old with an iPhone? At exclusive private schools like Friends, the question is further complicated by the involvement of wealthy parents. As these schools have grown more expensive - Friends costs nearly $50,000 a year - administrators have found themselves trying to balance their own institutional values with the demands of parents who are in a sense high-paying customers. Teachers are increasingly caught between the two."

I am concerned with the way we approach digital citizenship as this boogey-man, scare-fueled conversation. What would it mean if we allowed kids to make mistakes? What if we treated social media indiscretions as a chance to grow? What if we approached them as learning opportunities? What if we were quicker to listen and slower to judge? What if we viewed it as an evolving story rather than a permanent digital tattoo? Do we risk making kids so risk-averse and image-conscious that they can't be authentic? And are we doing enough to allow all students to express their identity, even in the face of bigotry? What if we shifted the conversation from "here's what to avoid" to "what can you do to promote positive change?" What if we highlighted more of the stories of kids who are creating things and sharing them with the world? What if we celebrated those times when students were courageously authentic about their identity even in the midst of bigotry and intolerance? What if, instead of saying, "your future employer will look at your Facebook," we also had a conversation about corporations and privacy?"

"What I see is this. In the majority of cases, the catalyst for the shooting was something that threatened the man's identity as a man. The main statistic is inarguable-69 males to one lone female. Being a man is the single most common characteristic of every mass shooting in the last 32 years. I'd prefer to think that men are not inherently more violent-most men do not become violent for any reason. And while biology, strength and testosterone can't be completely discounted, I'd rather look at whether the pressures to conform to a certain type of masculinity are so strong that not being able to do so can cause a person to break under the pressure."

Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father's voice. "I'll hold your hand, O.K.?" Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: "Don't cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you're a man: 'I'm a man!' " The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. "I'm a man!" he barks through tears and gritted teeth. The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger. More immediately, it captured, in profound concision, the earliest stirrings of a male identity at war with itself. This is no small thing. As students discover in this course, an Honors College seminar called "Real Men Smile: The Changing Face of Masculinity," what boys seem to need is the very thing they fear. Yet when they are immunized against this deeper emotional honesty, the results have far-reaching, often devastating consequences. Despite the emergence of the metrosexual and an increase in stay-at-home dads, tough-guy stereotypes die hard. As men continue to fall behind women in college, while outpacing them four to one in the suicide rate, some colleges are waking up to the fact that men may need to be taught to think beyond their own stereotypes."

We are witnessing a great explosion in the way that human beings are allowed to express their gender identities. We are also hearing a lot of awkward conversations. What are we supposed to ... call everyone? A recent scene on HBO's "Girls" riffed on this problem, drawing a linguistic fault line down a Brooklyn street. On one side is a no-frills coffee joint run by Ray Ploshansky, the show's resident grumpy old man. (He's, like, 38.) Across the street, a hip new cafe springs up and instantly hoovers up Ray's clientele. When Ray crosses the road to eyeball the competition, he encounters a barista he can't quite size up. First he calls the barista "sir," and the barista balks, "Why'd you feel the need to call me 'sir'?" So Ray tries "female?" and the barista says: "Oh, 'female'? You a biologist? You a biological essentialist? Are you a detective?" So Ray asks, "What's going on here?" and a second barista steps in to explain: "What's going on here is that you offended they, and you offended me, so I think it's best that you leave." He does. The baristas embrace. The cafe clash took the language debate of the moment and personified its most extreme positions. On one side are people like Ray, who come off as clueless and offensive for failing to recalibrate their language to accommodate people who don't identify as "he" or "she." On the other side are "theys" like the barista, who can sound unreasonable and absurd when they try to police new rules of language that are still in flux. But in the subtext of the scene, a third figure emerged. The barista character was played by the younger sibling of Lena Dunham, the creator of "Girls": Grace Dunham, a young queer writer and performer who identifies as a "trans person with a vagina" and recently wrote on Twitter, "I hate, fear and am allergic to binaries" - and is also game for joking about how hard it can be to get everybody on the same page.

"How a children's toy can be an identity marker for adults"

"FRONTLINE explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media - and how big brands are increasingly co-opting young consumers' digital presences."

"In the lead-up to tonight's film, Generation Like, we've been asking our Facebook and Twitter communities to tell us why you use social and how it's affecting your lives. Hundreds of you have told us about the choices you're making - and why you're making them. We've asked a few writers who've thought a lot about social media to read your comments and reflect on them in the context of tonight's film. We also want to hear from you! Share your reactions below in the comments. Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Douglas Rushkoff, Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff: Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff is the author, most recently, of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, as well a dozen other books on media, technology and culture. He was correspondent on three previous FRONTLINE films, The Merchants of Cool (2001), The Persuaders (2004), and Digital Nation (2010). Follow him on Twitter @Rushkoff. In the lead-up to Generation Like, FRONTLINE has been asking questions about social media on social media. As I wade through the many responses, I am reminded of my own questions about these platforms when I began making this documentary. Like me, many of you are thrilled by the opportunity for connection and self-expression that social media offer.   Calum James Facebook is the best communication tool ever created. February 12 at 7:02pm   But many of you also share a sense of skepticism about what it is that social media - and the companies behind them - ask from us in return.   We all know this has something to do with our data. We create consumer profiles for the unseen companies on the other side of the screen, and enter into a relationship with them that isn't entirely clear. "Who is doing what for whom, and to what end?" The need to understand this better - and what it means for the young people using this stuff - is what set us on our journey to explor

"What is it that makes you...you? NPR's Shankar Vedantam explores new research that suggests the labels we use to categorize people affect not just who they are now, but who they'll be in the future."