The hows and whys of hair

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Lemonada.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Are you ready for a brand new adventure? Then check out Lions and Legends, the new kids and family podcast featuring fun, fantastical retellings of myths, legends, folktales, and fables from around the world. I'm Rebecca Shear, former host of Circle Round and the new host of Lions and Legends, inviting you to follow Lions and Legends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and come join the pride.

Alex Harris (0:37)

Brains On Universe. You're listening to Brains On, where we're serious about being curious.

Molly Bloom (0:48)

What is your favorite thing about your hair?

Alex Harris (0:50)

How smooth it is. Where I can just comb it back and then go do whatever.

Molly Bloom (0:56)

I have really curly hair, which I used to not like at all when I was your age. But now I like that I don't have to do anything to it, and it can just kind of do its own thing. And whether you love your hair or just want to shave it all off, we're going to show you today how complex and cool it really is.

SPEAKER_1 (1:10)

Keep listening.

Molly Bloom (1:14)

You're listening to Brains On, part of the Brains On Universe. I'm Molly Bloom, and we have two co-hosts coming to us today, Kate and Alex from Plano.

Alex Harris (1:24)

Hi. Hello.

Molly Bloom (1:25)

And you two recently got a closer look at hair. You wrote in to us and told us that you were looking at strands of hair under a microscope. What gave you the idea to check that out?

Alex Harris (1:34)

We just got a new microscope, so. We decided to peek at our hair.

Molly Bloom (1:40)

And what did you see when you looked at the hair?

Alex Harris (1:41)

Well, my hair was, it had like little black dots all over it. And mine only had one. And my mom's gray hair had a ginormous line through it.

Molly Bloom (1:52)

Interesting. And you guys both have brown hair, right? But it looked different under the microscope.

Alex Harris (1:57)

Yeah, much different.

Molly Bloom (1:59)

And when you put the hair under the microscope, is there anything special you have to do to it first?

Alex Harris (2:03)

You have to adjust it, then do lighting. And then there's also slides that you have to put it in to make it stay.

Molly Bloom (2:11)

So you take the hair and put it on a slide, and then you put it under the microscope, and you can see what it looks like really close up.

Alex Harris (2:17)

It's really cool.

Molly Bloom (2:18)

That's awesome. Well, a little later in the show, we're going to talk to a scientist who looks at hair under a very powerful microscope. But first, let's start with the basics. A little hair 101, if you will.

Here's a question to get us growing, I mean, going.

Alex Harris (2:33)

My name is Iolanta. I'm eight years old. I live in Calgary, Alberta. My question is, what is hair made of, and why do humans have hair and not fur like animals do?

Molly Bloom (2:43)

We'll get to the second half of that question later, but first, what is hair anyway? Is it alive?

Alex Harris (2:49)

It grows, but doesn't have nerves the way skin does. You can pinch it without pain. And it's pretty strong stuff, but how is it so bendy?

Molly Bloom (2:57)

We asked Dr. Shani Francis to help untangle these questions. She's a dermatologist and the director of the Hair Center of Excellence, awesome title by the way, at North Shore University Health System in Evanston, Illinois.

Shani Francis (3:08)

Hair is basically protein, but it has a very complex structure in how the protein is arranged. It's very organized. The best way to describe it is like a rope of string that has many smaller ropes that are twisted and braided together. If you take a piece of yarn and you know how the yarn comes, and then you can unravel it and you see little smaller pieces of string, think about that, but amplify that and maybe take two or three or four, 30 pieces of string and then coil those together in a rope. And that's how the structure of each hair fiber is. So basically is pieces of string that have been twisted together and then those twists have been twisted together and then those twists have been twisted together. So you have just a big large rope. Very cool and a lot of protein.

Alex Harris (4:04)

So each strand of hair is a collection of smaller strands, making the structure strong when it's pulled, but flexible when you bend it, just like a rope.