Have you ever wondered what happens to all the hair that ends up in your hairbrush? It seems like not much, right?
Well, researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found some pretty cool uses for it!
They’ve discovered how to turn human hair waste into a kind of material that can hide secret messages and even help detect pollution.
Here’s the problem: people shed a lot of hair. You might lose anywhere from 50 to 100 strands a day, and that adds up to a lot of hair waste over time.
This hair can take years to break down naturally, and sometimes it ends up in places where it’s not so great for the environment, like dumps or incinerators.
There, it can give off harmful gases and even help harmful bacteria to grow.
But Professor Sow Chorng-Haur from NUS and his team have thought of a way to put this waste to good use.
They’ve come up with a method to change the hair, using heat, into something that can be used to hide information or check for certain types of pollution.
To do this, they used heat to change the chemical nature of the hair, making it glow under UV light.
They found that they could engrave tiny glowing patterns onto a hair strand using a laser beam, making it much brighter.
They could even control the laser so it didn’t damage the hair, leaving a strand that looked normal but had a secret message that could only be seen under UV light!
What’s more, the researchers found that heat-treated white hair reacted to a chemical called methylene blue, a dye often used in the textile industry. When in contact with this chemical, the hair glowed brightly under UV light.
This could potentially be a cost-effective way to detect pollution from this dye in bodies of water.
The research team is now looking at ways to develop this process further, perhaps by turning the heated hair into an ink for printing hidden messages.
So, next time you clean your hairbrush, just think – that hair could be a secret message in the making! The study was published in the journal Advanced Photonics Research.
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