A serious question about hair!
A very serious question has come to my attention this morning.
Why does some hair only grow to a certain length?
You would think all hair would do the same thing...just grow. I mean it all does grow but some of it reaches a point where it thinks 'Yep, that'll do! That's enough!' How does some hair know to stop growing? Or does all hair continually grow but some types of hair have a shorter life expectancy so they die before they ever get very long?? Maybe head hair follicles are like the giant tortoises of the world...they just live and live and grow and grow. But leg hair is more like...a dragonfly (maximum lifespan of 4 months!)
A sort of relevant dragonfly!
Or...
Maybe it is programmed differently! And the cells are somehow designed to know to only grow to a certain length...let me see what Google knows... Ooh, we might be onto something; "Hair length is completely controlled by the length of the anagen phase of your hair follicle." So, during the anagen phase of the hair cycle, the hair grows. The hair stops growing when the cycle enters its next phase, the catagen phase. But... "It isn’t yet known what triggers the catagen phase." (I double checked with Google...Wikipedia states "An unknown signal causes the follicle to go into the catagen phase.") Great, so we have a name for the amount of time that hair grows for but that's it. I suppose at least it's all controlled by the same thing...
(This is completely irrelevant! Was all looking a bit serious!)
Basically, my thinking this morning whilst shaving was..."If we knew how hair growth was controlled then surely we could reprogram it to stop growing much sooner." You wouldn't be able to stop it growing completely, but if there was a way to start the catagen phase earlier, then the hair would be much shorter. I don't think many people would be too fussed about shaving if hair only grew to about...0.01mm long! But then I suppose it would put a lot of companies out of business if no one needed hair removal anymore. Maybe someone does know! And they're being paid a lot of money to keep quiet about it. Ooh, new conspiracy!
So if anyone knows of any way to discover what triggers the catagen phase of the hair growth cycle, let me know! I think we could be onto something astronomical! (I used a thesaurus...I needed a word bigger than gigantic. Another word I could have apparently used was brobdingnagian! I never knew such a word existed! But I think we have learnt enough for today!)
Today's thoughts have been brought to you by 'Reflecting in Reflections' otherwise know as 'Thinking too much whilst looking in the bathroom mirror'.
Have a great day everyone :D
Information taken from:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/why-does-hair-only-grow-to-a-certain-length/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_follicle
I looked this up years ago and all I remember of the answer now is "because that's the way it is," Your leg hair has a standard length that isn't like the hair on your head. If you read the Wikipedia article on human hair you'll find the science.
Lol, "Because that's the way it is" still seems to be the answer! It's Wikipedia that states that "the anagen phase is ended by an unknown signal". I find it fascinating that you can still stumble across things like this that no one knows the answer to! :)
It gets more complex than that. If you have a brown-blond complexion, you'll notice your beard is made up from a mix of colors (some facial hair may be totally black, others totally yellow-white) that ultimately create the impression of a homogeneous color somewhere in the middle - which looks similar to the hair color. Now how does each hair follicle know what to do without some "master programming" organizing this...
Wow, this is an intriguing subject!! Started having a read of Wiki - genetics and biochemistry of hair colour...the more you look into it the more questions you end up with! And I don't think there's any scientific answers... :S
There's a saying that for every question there is an answer. But it doesn't necessarily need to be correct. For example science has "explanations" for dejavu as well. They say "oh it's one optical nerve that lags in transmission and the brain gets the two optical signals at slightly different speeds, so you get the replay sensation". Yet that doesn't explain why I know what will happen +5/+10s afterwords (I have the entire "scene" in my mind on how it'll unfold). But the "explanation", as bogus as it may be, exists anyway so as for scientists not to appear "ignorant". "Oh we know what it is"... yeah right.
Yes, I've found 'It's probably genetics' quite a lot! Your articles look really interesting, will be having a read through those :) Do you have any theories about ancient civilisations? That's another of my interests which always raises more and more questions!
I haven't really started to write a lot (20-30-40 articles aren't a lot by my standard) but I hope to change that and extend in spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, mind-body connections, quantum stuff, etc.
As for ancient civilizations, one of my theories is ...alien interaction, if not "cultivation" of our species by aliens who experimented on the higher primates.