Among the tea leaves that astronomers consult are the number of sunspots (dark and relatively cold blotches) on the sun's surface, and the slight variations in the earth's magnetic field that are somehow linked with the sun's more drastic changes.
67b396b8-64f0-4c1e-a5f3-8c8389edfcf0 IN 1843 Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, realised that sunspots, the black blotches that disfigure the solar surface, come and go in cycles of around 11 years.
These rocks enriched the ground beneath them with exotic minerals.Thirty-three yeafterftheirheir Nördlingen adventure, the Shoemakers watched as one of this scientific couple's latest co-discoveries, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, smashed into Jupiter in 20 consecutive fragments, scarring the vast planet with blotches thousands of miles across.
Thirty years later, thalidomide emerged as a potential treatment for Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer whose purple blotches are the bane of many HIV patients.
The remaining red blotches coincide with the traditional strongholds of the worker's movement and the post-Marxist political left: the major centres of heavy industry and/or intellectual non-conformity.
According to Nilton Renno, one of the mission's chief scientists, the blotches on the leg are probably drops of brine.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt encountered him in his 40s and dashed off a bitchy pen-portrait: "Very tall, very broad, large bulging eyes, swollen eyelids, heavy cheeks, untidy drooping moustache, battered complexion with red blotches".
Asian governments are stuck with the internet which, worryingly for the dictatorships among them, seems as integral to the future as black blotches on newsprint seem to the past.
The northern leopard frog is a favorite for its classic speckled appearance, being more or less green with black blotches over its back, sides, and legs.
The eggs are usually white or buff, sometimes pale gray or pale green, immaculate in a few species but usually with brown spots or blotches at one end.
Garter snake (genus Thamnophis), any of more than a dozen species of nonvenomous snakes having a striped pattern suggesting a garter: typically, one or three longitudinal yellow to red stripes, between which are checkered blotches.
