Why does the hair on your head grow to an indeterminate length, but your eyelash hair doesn't?
What component of snot and boogers makes them sticky? Can it be purified or made synthetically, free of infectious agents, and sold as an organic adhesive? Has this already been done?
Take a closer look at familiar objects, people, things you may think you know, and you'll find something new and strange and wonderful.
2 comments:
some people could make a fortune.
Well, according to JAAD, the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 6-7 years is a reasonable upper bound for the time a hair follicle is active, and around 13mm/month is a reasonable upper bound for the growth rate of human hair. Hair typically falls out when the growth phase ends, apparently, so an upper bound for hair length would be just over 1m. The length of any hair would be the integral of the growth rate from time 0 (hair just starting to grow) to any given t less than the maximum growth time, with respect to time, assuming the hair falls out after growth stops. Interestingly, according to Guinness, some people have hair far greater than 1m, so this may be an unwarranted assumption. Of course, at some point hair would detach from the follicle under its own weight, but that length might be so long that it has no empirical significance. In any case, the length of scalp hair is not really indeterminate, it is just very long due to the relatively high growth rate, while the rate of growth for eyelashes is so low that the maximum length during the active growth phase is a few cm at the most.
As far as boogers are concerned, my guess, not very surprisingly, would be mucin, a highly glycosylated, highly cross-linked fibrous protein, hence its tendency to form gels. I did some cursory research, and apparently the primary structure of some mucins is very similar to the primary structure of caseins, the major ingredient in Elmer's glue, although caseins are phosphorylated and much more globular. Anyway, bioadhesives are a hot topic among the materials people, so you may be on to something.
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