Weekend All Things Considered

For every farmer who is hurting this year during the drought, others are benefiting. Many fields in the South, Northwest and Upper Midwest are producing bountiful corn crops. And because the drought has pushed prices to record highs, farmers who have corn to sell expect a terrific payday.

"The corn has actually really, really taken off all the way through season. It's grown fast. It's been accelerated. The corn looks really good now," says John Scott, whose family farm in Sargeant, Minn., is just bursting with corn.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

Tonight, Mitt Romney accepts his party's nomination for president, as the Republican National Convention wraps up in Tampa. Last night, it was his running mate Paul Ryan's turn. And in his speech, Ryan made a number of statements that have made this a busy day for fact-checkers. Among them, Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post.

Glenn, welcome to the program.

GLENN KESSLER: Thank you for having me.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

We turn now to my co-host, Robert Siegel, who's at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, where tonight Mitt Romney accepts his party's nomination for president. We're going to hear about that in a moment. But Robert, first, I understand there's some dissention in the ranks there, at the convention center. What's going on?

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Scientists in Germany have been able to get enough DNA from a fossilized pinky to produce a high-quality DNA sequence of the pinky's owner.

"It's a really amazing-quality genome," says David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. "It's as good as modern human genome sequences, from a lot of ways of measuring it."

The pinky belonged to a girl who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Scientists aren't sure about the exact age. She is a member of an extinct group of humans called Denisovans. The name comes from Denisova cave in Siberia, where the pinky was found.

As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series "Mom and Dad's Record Collection."