Will more more white hair grow if I pluck them?

"Hmm..to pluck or not to pluck?"

The other day I noted some debris on the hair of a friend of mine, it was probably just some dust but somehow the conversation went from dust to white hair to the saying, "If you pluck your white hair more will grow".

Looking scientifically farfetched, I thought this would be a good myth to bust. Lets get down to business by discussing anatomy first. Your hair grows from hair follicles and the color of your hair is determined by the amount of melanin it contains. Melanin is produced from keratocytes located around the follicle. A hair turns grey or white when the keratocytes around its follicle do not produce enough melanin for it.

So lets say you noticed a white hair on your head and went ahead to pluck it off, the hair follicle will then react to grow another strand of hair and if the causative factor for decreased melanin was not eliminated, there won't be any melanin for the next growing hair of that follicle - causing the new hair to be white too. The action of plucking a hair does not cause the hair follicle to divide into 10 and then grow 10 more new white hairs.

Causative factors include, but are not limited to: genetics, smoking, stress, age or a poor diet. If grey hair occurs in younger people, it can be a sign of certain medical conditions such as neurofibromatosis, tuberous sclerosis, vitamin B12 deficiency, or hyperthyroidism. These people should seek professional medical advice.

But in most of the cases, grey hair tend to occur in older people and steps like: quitting smoking, reducing stress and cultivating a balanced diet with sufficient iron, copper, Vitamins B and green vegetables could reduce the amount of grey hair. For many, a short term solution would be to dye their hair with either artificial or natural dyes that are available in the market.

So, in conclusion, you can go ahead pluck that white hair of yours, but another white hair will grow soon enough if you did not eliminate the causative factors and not because you plucked the previous one.

Were we actually the fastest swimmers back in the uterus?

All these while, we've all been boasting about, "I was the fastest swimmer, I beat all the other sperms to reach the egg first!" It is true that only one sperm fertilizes the ovum, but this sperm (us) is not necessarily the one that actually swam the fastest to reach the egg first.

Explanation?

From the few hundred million (few 100,000,000) sperms in the male's semen, many of them die on the journey to find the egg, and only an average of about 100 sperms actually reach the fertilization site, where they meet with the ovum.

Upon meeting the ovum, they encounter 2 barriers to break, the corona radiata and the zona pellucida. In layman's terms it would be the walls around the fortress. These walls are not easily penetrable, the first batch of sperms (champion swimmers) that actually reaches the egg usually die off while trying to break down these 2 walls, just like the infantries of the forefront of an army, they usually take the biggest blow before the second or third waves of attacks successfully breaks through the enemies defense.

So, in actual fact, these fastest swimmers that reached the outside of the egg first, die off from the fatigue of swimming so fast and the effort of breaking down these walls, allowing the relatively slower swimmers (us) to have a smoother journey to reach the inside of an egg (the plasma membrane) first, and consequently, fertilizing it.

The conclusion is, we were not the fastest swimmers, we were the smartest swimmers. We conserved our energies by taking a slower swim and then use our remaining energies for breaking down the last little barrier left to reach the inside of an egg first and fertilizing it, just like the old saying: "Slow and steady wins the race!" =]