Sunday, April 12, 2009

Dimensions

Hair, whether it is curly or straight, is affected by the amount of humidity in the air. It serves as a restoring force for the hair, forcing water back into the hair fiber and forcing hair shaft to return to its original structure. This may be more noticeable in somebody with curly hair because it tends to get frizzy when the humidity rises. According to The Physics Factbook, the diameter of human hair ranges from 17 to 181 µm. It varies slightly with ethnicity, where Europeans generally have 57-90 µm and Asians around 120 µm. By using hair-water partitioning, the density of hair is estimated to 1.32 kg/L. Thus, considering hair as cylindrical, the weight of a single hair is between 3 and 340 microgram per cm, for a diameter of 17 and 181 µm respectively.

The diameter of an average human eyelash ranges from 0.05mm to 0.20mm.

Drugs used in cancer chemotherapy frequently cause a temporary loss of hair, noticeable on the head and eyebrows, because they kill all rapidly dividing cells, not just the cancerous ones. Other diseases and traumas can cause temporary or permanent loss of hair, either generally or in patches. Patients with Hyperthyroidism or Hypothyroidism can experience hair loss until their hormone levels are regulated. The hair shafts may store certain poisons for years, even decades, after death. In the case of Col. Lafayette Baker, who died July 3, 1868, use of an atomic absorption spectrophotometer showed the man was killed by white arsenic. The prime suspect was Wally Pollack, Baker's brother-in-law. According to Dr. Ray A. Neff, Pollack had laced Baker's beer with it over a period of months, and a century or so later minute traces of arsenic showed up in the dead man's hair. Mrs. Baker's diary seems to confirm that it was indeed arsenic, as she writes of how she found some vials of it inside her brother's suitcoat one day.

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