Why and how do some men go bald?

Male pattern baldness is the most common type of hair loss in men. It's scientific name is Alopecia, it usually follows a typical pattern of receding hairline and hair thinning on the crown and is caused by the male hormone testosterone and genetic predisposition.

Male pattern baldness does not indicate a medical disorder, but it may affect self- esteem or cause anxiety. The loss hair is usually permanent. Widely known complication of Alopecia are psychological stress and the loss of self-esteem due to change in appearance.

Hair grows about an inch every couple of months.Each hair grows for 2 to 6 years, remains at that length for a short period, and then falls out. A new hair soon begins growing in its place. At any one time, about 85% of the hair on your heads is in the growing phase and 15% is not.





Each hair sits in a cavity in the skin called follicle. Baldness in men occurs when the follicle shrinks over time, result and finer hair. The end result is a very small follicle with no hair inside. Ordinarily, hair should grow back but in men who are balding, the follicle fails to grow a new hair.Why this occurs is not well understood, but it is related to your genes and male sex hormones. Even though they are small, the follicles remain alive suggesting the possibility of new growth.

Why do stars twinkle?

Why do stars twinkle?

Stacie
Solon, Ohio

John A. Graham, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, explains.

Have you ever noticed how a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool seems to wobble from side to side? This phenomenon occurs because the water in the pool bends the path of light from the coin. Similarly, stars twinkle because their light has to pass through several miles of Earth's atmosphere before it reaches the eye of an observer. It is as if we are looking up at the universe from the bottom of a swimming pool. Our atmosphere is very turbulent, with streams and eddies forming, churning around and dispersing all the time. These disturbances act like lenses and prisms that shift the incoming light from a star from side to side by minute amounts several times a second. For large objects like the moon, these deviations average out. (Through a telescope with high magnification, however, we see shimmering images.) Stars, in contrast, are so far away that they effectively act as point sources, and the light we see flickers in intensity as the incoming beams bend rapidly from side to side. Planets like Mars, Venus and Jupiter, which appear to us as bright stars, are much closer to Earth and look like measurable discs through a telescope. Again, the twinkling from adjacent areas of the disc averages out, and we see little variation in the total light emanating from the planet.


In outer space, where there is no atmosphere, stars do not twinkle. This is why the Hubble Space Telescope can produce the brilliant and crisp images of the universe that we have come to know. At our Earthbound observatories, we are learning how to compensate for the twinkling effect by adapting the optics of our large telescopes as fast as it occurs. As a result, we should soon be able to produce much sharper images from here on the ground.

Why does hair turn gray?

Why does hair turn gray?
Mandi,
Pennsylvania

Laurence Meyer, a dermatologist at the University of Utah, offers this explanation:

The pigment in hair, as well as in the skin, is called melanin. There are two types of melanin: eumelanin, which is dark brown or black, and pheomelanin, which is reddish yellow. Both are made by a type of cell called a melanocyte that resides in the hair bulb and along the bottom of the outer layer of skin, or epidermis. The melanocytes pass this pigment to adjoining epidermal cells called keratinocytes, which produce the protein keratin—hair's chief component. When the keratinocytes undergo their scheduled death, they retain the melanin. Thus, the pigment that is visible in the hair and in the skin lies in these dead keratinocyte bodies.

The control of this pigment production is complex, and somewhat different for skin and hair, but there are clear genetic factors. One is the recently identified MC1R gene. Alleles of this gene are associated with red hair in humans, cows and many other species. (Pigment can also tie in with the hair cycle—that is, the process of a new hair growing and stopping at a preset length—as seen in animals such as an agouti mouse, where the tip of the hair differs in color from the shaft.)

Gray hair, then, is simply hair with less melanin, and white hair has no melanin at all. Genes control this lack of deposition of melanin, too. In some families, many members' hair turns white in their 20s. Generally speaking, among Caucasians 50 percent are 50 percent gray by age 50. There is, however, wide variation. This number differs for other ethnic groups, again demonstrating the effect of genetic control.

Exactly how hair loses its pigment remains unclear. In the early stages of graying, the melanocytes are still present but inactive. Later on they seem to decrease in number. In general, this type of graying is not associated with any disease, although it can be associated with some autoimmune processes. But graying in a young adult is not itself a sign of any health problem.

Why do bees buzz?

Why do bees buzz?

M. O'Malley
Newton, Mass.

Gard Otis, a professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who studies bee behaviour, ecology and evolution, explains.

Bees buzz for two reasons. First, the rapid wingbeats of many species create wind vibrations that people hear as buzzes. The larger the bee, the slower the wingbeat and the lower the pitch of the resulting buzz. This is a phenomenon of the wingbeats and not specifically of bees--some flies, beetles, and wasps also have buzzy flight caused by their wingbeats.

In addition some bees, most commonly bumblebees (genus Bombus), are capable of vibrating their wing muscles and thorax (the middle segment of their body) while visiting flowers. These vibrations shake the pollen off the flower's anthers and onto the bee's body. Some of that pollen then gets deposited on the next flower the bee visits, resulting in pollination. The bee grooms the remainder of the pollen onto special pollen-carrying structures (on the hind legs of most bees) and takes it back to the nest to feed to the larvae.

When bumblebees vibrate flowers to release pollen, the corresponding buzz is quite loud. Honeybees (genus Apis) are incapable of buzz-pollination and are usually quiet when foraging on flowers. As an aside, some flowers are adapted to pollination by pollinators capable of "buzz-pollination." Tomatoes, green peppers and blueberries all have tubular anthers with the pollen inside the tube. When the bee vibrates the flower, the pollen falls out of the tubular anther onto the bee. Consequently, bumblebees pollinate these crops much more efficiently than honeybees do.

Why can't a person tickle himself?

Why can't a person tickle himself?

T. Bogaerts
Lebanon, Tenn.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, explains.

The answer lies at the back of the brain in an area called the cerebellum, which is involved in monitoring movements. Our studies at University College London have shown that the cerebellum can predict sensations when your own movement causes them but not when someone else does. When you try to tickle yourself, the cerebellum predicts the sensation and this prediction is used to cancel the response of other brain areas to the tickle.

Two brain regions are involved in processing how tickling feels. The somatosensory cortex processes touch and the anterior cingulate cortex processes pleasant information. We found that both these regions are less active during self-tickling than they are during tickling performed by someone else, which helps to explains why it doesn't feel tickly and pleasant when you tickle yourself. Further studies using robots showed that the presence of a small delay between your own movement and the resulting tickle can make the sensation feel tickly. Indeed, the longer the delay, the more tickly it feels. So it might be possible to tickle yourself, if you are willing to invest in a couple of robots!

Why Quotations ...

Thinking about why things happen and why? These are my collections of why quotations to live by day after day.That mirrors our entity and guide us in some other way.


“Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand-in-hand.”
Emily Kimbrough quotes


“Why do people persist in a dissatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It's because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they're already experiencing.”


“There are two great days in a person's life -- the day we are born and the day we discover why.”
William Barclay quotes


“Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.”
Friedrich Nietzsche quotes


“When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed.”
Jane Fonda quotes


“No matter how many times I tell you she'll break you heart, or how many times she does it, you'll never give up, Why you ask?...because you love her.”


“I wept when I was born and every day explains why”
Spanish Proverb quotes