The benefits humans get from suntans far outweigh the risks of overdoing it, an astronomer whose life work has been studying the sun wrote last week in a column that’s getting lots of attention.

Bob Berman — an American astronomer described as a “science populizer” for writing books such as “The Sun’s Heartbeat: An Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet” — wrote last week that the advent of mass-sunscreen sales has spawned an unnatural generation that is just now waking up to the fact that sun avoidance kills.

According to Berman, when humans started wearing sunscreen 365/24 in the past generation, “The metamorphosis was complete: we had become like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s book The Time Machine, shielded almost totally from sunlight’s UV.”

Berman’s column — which appeared in high-tech blog Gizmodo.com — quoted vitamin D guru Dr. John Cannell extensively. Cannell will be part of the scientific symposium being conducted as a pre-convention function at Smart Tan Downtown, Oct. 14 in Downtown Nashville.

To read Berman’s column, click here.

To learn more about Smart Tan Downtown, click here.