Hair and Fiber Lab in

Hair and Fiber Lab In all hair samples (the human pulled and cut samples from head and body as well as the animal samples), it was fairly easy to identify the cortex, pigment granules, cuticles, and the medulla one the highest power of my rather rudimentary microscope. Using the magnifying glass was not nearly as effective; while the cortex and cuticle could definitely be seen with greater clarity, the medulla and pigment granules were much more difficult to discern.

The medulla appears quite clearly as a darker area running through the middle of the human hair samples in a fairly solid line, though in the animal hair sample the medulla appears to be segmented, or appears in broken pieces rather than in the solid line as in the human samples.

The cuticles could not be seen on the cut samples, but appeared largely similar in both the human and animal pulled samples, which is in contrast to the cortexes of the two different species of hair that contained very different patterns from each other. The colors of the human and animal hairs were very different, but the pigment granules themselves appeared to have fairly similar shapes.

Placing the hair and fiber samples on the flashlight did not lead to many hugely substantial differences in the observed color or shape of the strands. There did appear to be some difference in the color of the hair samples, which were lighter when placed on the flashlight but this is easily explained as a difference directly attributable to the difference in lighting.

The outer parts of the hair strands, however, also appeared slightly more transparent, and the darker area of the medulla was more easily observable through the magnifying glass when the strands were placed on the flashlight than when they were simply observed on the paper. No real discernable differences were noted with the synthetic fiber that was examined on the flashlight, however.

Many of the identifying features of the hair can be seen in both the cut and the pulled samples, and the root of the hair did not really seem to have a great deal of significance in the observations made under the magnifying glass with or without the flashlight, or under the microscope.

I suppose there are some instances where it would be useful to se the cuticle of the hair, and certainly the presence or absence of the cuticle in a hair sample found at a crime scene could have some significance in terms of recreating differences or determining how the sample came to be present (e.g.

If it was pulled out during a struggle or simply broke off in the normal course of daily activities, for instance), but from what I observed it would not be as useful in identifying individuals as the hair itself. The hair itself is also more useful in differentiating between species than is the cuticle, and certainly the differences in human and non-human hair make this distinction easily possible whether or not the cuticle is present, so its need in this experiment is not entirely clear to me.

The magnifying glass I used was somewhat useful in examining the larger structures of the.