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...
Using this, I was actually able see the medulla quite clearly, including the separate segments of medulla that appeared in the animal hair strands. On the whole, I would say that the entire experiment worked for me, and made it clear that a strand of hair is much less the uniform and solid structure that I thought it was and is actually composed of many different structures and pieces that fit together to make the whole. Also, though hair is not really seen as a substantial thing normally, it seemed strangely both more and less substantial in different phases of the experiment, with the flashlight illuminating how close to nothingness it really is.
