Scientists in Japan have taken a bald mouse and successfully regrown its hair. Even more interesting is that the scientists were able to control the color and density of hair. You see that on this particular bald mouse that appears to have eyelashes growing out of his neck. Mice are so ugly.

These researchers cultivated two different kinds of mice hair follicles and then transplanted them onto a mouse. It took about three weeks for 74% of the follicles to grow hair. The scientists then transplanted the hair follicles on the mouse’s back, and it grew human hair. Certainly, if they can grow human hair on a mouse, they’ll be able to grow it on human heads before long.

[via CBS News]

This guy from Intelligent Automation Inc. got his haircut by a robot for St. Baldrick’s day, which usually involves completely shaving your head and collecting donations to help fund childhood cancer research. Let’s just say that the robot barber needs to go back to beauty school. At least it didn’t cut his head off.

It looks downright scary to trust your head to a robot and at least now we know that they suck at cutting hair. The chit-chat sucks too. Keep human barbers alive!

[IEEE Spectrum via io9 via geekosystem]

And I know I may not be a kid anymore, but all I know is, I probably would’ve wanted a couple of these 8-Bit Hair Bows to keep my mane in place.

They’re delightfully geeky and will appeal to a lot of girls (and maybe even some guys?). They’re not just for gamers, either, because the red and black pixelated look actually makes for a pretty stylish design.

The 8-Bit Hair Bows are available for purchase from ThinkGeek for $6.99(USD) a piece.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It won’t be long before this robot is washing hair in hospitals, salons etc. Once they tweak it some more, I can even see it dying grandma’s hair blue and giving people rough haircuts in under 5 minutes. Maybe it could even cut some pre-loaded designs into people’s hair and tattoo skulls. Personally, I don’t care what it can do, I won’t be trusting my fragile skull to this thing.

[via robots-dreams]

The hair dryer looks like the electronic voicebox/breathing apparatus that Anakin Skywalker has to use to talk in his life support suit. You can bet that this will never get made, unless George Lucas licenses it. However, I still like how it looks.

What’s next? A Yoda hair curler, a Boba Fett espresso machine? I can already some winning combinations right there. I can only imagine what kind of kitchen appliances Imperial officers use.

[via Nerd Approved]

Now we bring you more hair-raising works of art made with human hair, and this time, you’re supposed to wear these on your neck. No resin holding these together this time, though.

I don’t what to say about these necklaces except that they’re attractive yet bring up some sense of aversion at the same time. This is exactly Kerry Howley’s line of thinking when she came up with these hair necklaces as part of her Attraction/Aversion collection for her award-winning 2011 graduate collection.

She explains it like so: When your hair is still on your head, it’s something that a lot of people, most especially women, take pride in. They go to great lengths and measures to maintain their tresses and make their mane of hair look good and groomed. But once the hair leaves the roots, it’s something that, well, might cause a sense of aversion in some people.

Through her collection, Kerry made an attempt to make this unrooted hair attractive again. So what do you think? Was she successful in doing so with her hair necklaces?

[via Trend Hunter]

As a response to today’s quick-to-dispose society, Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves have come up with a stylish and innovative collection of glasses and spectacles that are made from… human hair.

Designers Murakami and Groves, who are both graduates from the Royal College of Art, collaborated to come up with this collection of fashion-forward eyewear that is 100% biodegradable and 101% wearable.

I’m not sure how a lot of people would feel, wearing someone’s hair on their spectacles, but these are actually bound together and coated with resin for good measure so it won’t even feel like you’re wearing hair, at least.

The collection is currently being displayed in London as part of the graduate exhibition of the Royal College of Arts until July 3. If you’re in the area, drop by to catch a glimpse of these hair-ific creations!

[via Gizmodo via Dvice]

The treatment helped the mice regrow hair and prevented young mice from losing hair to start with. The chemical compound was tested on mice that were genetically altered to overproduce a stress hormone called corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF). The newly developed anti-stress hormone was injected into the mice over five days.

The researchers discovered three months later that the subjects that had no hair were hairy again. “It was completely unexpected,” Jean Rivier, with the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., told Discovery News. “They couldn’t identify the mice except for their ear tags. That’s when they realized that they’d grown hair.” We are a long time out from this being down at the local drugstore; the team has to figure out what made the hair grow back, and then move on to human trials. Altogether now, ch-ch-cha-Chia!

[via Discovery]

By taking a single strand of Poliakoff’s hair (and a mighty head of hair he has) and subjecting it to a nano-etching technology, they managed to etch the entire periodic table onto a single strand of the hair. The entire thing is just 100 microns wide and 50 microns high. By irradiating the hair with ions of Gallium, tiny bits of the hair are flaked off, producing the microscopic table of elements.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need my reading glasses to see that for sure.

[via io9 via The Daily What]

The design is based on the robot hands that seem to be lying all over the place over at Panasonic’s Japanese headquarters. This robot will wash your head and massage it. It can even dry your hair and give neck massages.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The system uses 3D scanning to track the shape of a customer’s head, so that there are no mishaps. Once again, I’d rather have a human do this, but if humans are in short supply, I guess that this ‘bot will do.

[via DVice]

On the one hand, I have to offer deep props for both the love of Tetris and this guy’s stone cold guts. But on the other hand, I feel sorta like this might be the bizarro geek form of shaving lines in your eyebrows and that’s something I never want to see again.

The tips look pretty awesome, though. Definitely a good dye job, and I have to say I like the idea of impermanent fanboy support even more than the long-lived variety. Much cooler than a Tetris tattoo, I think… because next month, you could do something else. I want to see Q*bert body paint.

[Walyou via Hawty McBloggy]

The experiment was conducted by dermatologist Emi Nishimura in 2004. She exposed mice (their hair also grays with age) to genotoxic stressors – things that can damage our DNA – such as  chemotherapy drugs and x-rays. The hair of the mice turned gray, and as Nishimura said, “the stressed mice’s gray hairs and the cell populations in their follicles were indistinguishable from those of elderly mice, suggesting that genotoxic stress might drive natural graying as well.”

So what does all of this mean? Oncologist David Fisher says that while it’s very strong evidence that the things we encounter everyday – radiation from the sun, household chemicals, perhaps even the medicine we take – can all damage us at a genetic level, the experiment doesn’t prove that emotional stress can damage our DNA or induce premature maturation of our cells.

More importantly, the experiment shows that to some extent our body is capable of protecting itself from DNA-damaged cells by accelerating their aging. Fisher thinks that the experiment is a good starting point to find ways for our body to do the same to cancer cells – which are also DNA-damaged cells.

[via Science]