Category: Hair biology
6 articles in this category.
- Do hair and nails grow after death? — The widely believed claim that hair and fingernails keep growing after a person dies. They do not — but they really do look like they do, and there's a tidy bit of physics behind the illusion.
- Goosebumps — The little bumps that rise on your skin in the cold or during a stirring song are tiny muscles trying to fluff up fur you no longer have. In humans they are a charming evolutionary leftover; in furrier animals they still do a real job.
- Rapunzel syndrome — A rare and genuinely alarming medical condition in which a person who eats their own hair grows a hairball in the stomach with a long tail trailing into the intestine — named, with grim wit, after the fairy-tale princess.
- Whiskers (vibrissae) — Whiskers are not just fancy hairs — they are precision sensory instruments. Stiff, deeply wired, and arranged with surprising mathematical care, vibrissae let animals feel the shape of the world in the dark.
- Why hair turns gray — Gray hair is not really gray — it is a mix of pigmented and pigment-free strands, the result of color factories in the follicle quietly clocking out. And no, it cannot happen overnight, despite what they said about Marie Antoinette.
- World's longest hair — The record for the longest documented head of hair belongs to Xie Qiuping of China, whose hair reached 5.627 metres — about as long as a giraffe is tall. The secret is biology, patience, and an unusually long growth phase.