New technique harvests useful compounds from clipped-off human hair
When you think of all the human hair that gets cut off and discarded every day in salons around the world … well, that's a lot of wasted hair. That said, scientists in India have devised a new technique for extracting compounds from it, for use in products like wound dressings and sunscreen.Among other things, human hair is composed largely of a protein known as keratin (as are our fingernails) along with a pigment called melanin, which gives it its color.Although both substances have numerous potential applications,…