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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,

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Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

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Speaker 2: focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters. In time on

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Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, We've discussed the mythical Gorgon

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Speaker 2: Medusa at length, but today I want to look at

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Speaker 2: the character with the same name from the Marvel Comics universe.

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Speaker 2: This Medusa is an inhuman, a branch of Homo sapiens,

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Speaker 2: descended from experiments conducted on primitive humans by the alien

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Speaker 2: Cree to give them various emergent powers. While other inhumans

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Speaker 2: boast devastating offensive powers or highly augmented physiologies, Medusa's power

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Speaker 2: is all about her long red hair, which she can

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Speaker 2: extend to double its normal six foot length, and most

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Speaker 2: remarkably of all, control each strand as if it were

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Speaker 2: a highly prehensile arm or tentacle. She can cause her

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Speaker 2: scarlet locks to bundle together into reinforcing strands and accomplish

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Speaker 2: everything from minor tool manipulation to intense physical combat with

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Speaker 2: other superpowered individuals. Now as the excellent book Marvel Anatomy

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Speaker 2: by Mark Sumerak and Daniel Wallace, with illustrations by Jonah

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Speaker 2: Loebe points out Medusa's hair is just normal hair. It's

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Speaker 2: perhaps fuller and longer than most human heads of hair,

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Speaker 2: but its prehensile power stems not from its internal structure,

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Speaker 2: which is just the standard cross linked kerat and protein filament,

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Speaker 2: but from her own powerful psionic abilities. Yes, she has telekinesis,

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Speaker 2: but can only control her own hair, and that's no

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Speaker 2: slight against Medusa here. Think about it. The average human head,

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Speaker 2: according to Harvard's Bio Numbers website, consists of between ninety

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Speaker 2: thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand individual hairs, and

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Speaker 2: we might position her at the upper end of that spectrum,

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Speaker 2: even allotting for thicker hair shafts, as Sumac and Wallace suggest,

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Speaker 2: even being rather conservative. Let's say she's using her brain

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Speaker 2: to minutely control one hundred thousand strands of hair as

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Speaker 2: if they were one hundred thousand additional arms. Assuming that

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Speaker 2: her sonic powers emerged primarily through neural tissue, her brain

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Speaker 2: is putting in quite a lot of work here, in

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Speaker 2: addition to controlling her human limbs. Of course, remember that

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Speaker 2: an octopus in order to control. Its own sophisticated system

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Speaker 2: of grasping arms depends in part on intramuscular nerve cords

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Speaker 2: that act as sort of many brains to provide partially

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Speaker 2: independent action. So perhaps Medusa as well benefits from something

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Speaker 2: akin to this. We might well assume her telekinetic powers

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Speaker 2: rival those of Century or even those of the mighty

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Speaker 2: Jeen Gray, only much more localized in range. But if

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Speaker 2: telekinetic hair strand control is a heavy lift, what about

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Speaker 2: the actual physical lift of picking up various objects and

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Speaker 2: even superheroes with her telekinetically manipulated hair. This question is

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Speaker 2: a good bit easier to nail down, as we know

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Speaker 2: exactly how strong human hair is. As Tim Radford pointed

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Speaker 2: out in a two thousand and four article for The Guardian,

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Speaker 2: Secrets of Human Hair Unlocked at Natural History Museum in London,

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Speaker 2: a single human hair strand can only sustain a weight

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Speaker 2: of one hundred grams or three ounces, but when hair

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Speaker 2: is woven together it can sustain much more, a fact

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Speaker 2: that hair hangar aerialists have long exploited. In fact, if

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Speaker 2: all the strands of hair on a typical human head

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Speaker 2: were woven together, the resulting megabraid could hold twelve metric

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Speaker 2: tons or the weight of two elephants. So the idea

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Speaker 2: of Medusa coiling her braids and holding say, iron Man

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Speaker 2: in place, isn't that far fetched, at least from a

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Speaker 2: material standpoint. Interestingly enough, in the comics, as Queen of

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Speaker 2: the Inhumans, Medusa's greatest strength is perhaps her diplomatic abilities,

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Speaker 2: a reminder that while superpowered hair can move around superheroes,

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Speaker 2: a well placed word can move mountains. Tune in for

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Speaker 2: additional episodes of The Monster, Fact, The Artifact, or Animally

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Speaker 2: a Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us

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Speaker 2: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For

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Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.