Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters. In time on
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, We've discussed the mythical Gorgon
Speaker 2: Medusa at length, but today I want to look at
Speaker 2: the character with the same name from the Marvel Comics universe.
Speaker 2: This Medusa is an inhuman, a branch of Homo sapiens,
Speaker 2: descended from experiments conducted on primitive humans by the alien
Speaker 2: Cree to give them various emergent powers. While other inhumans
Speaker 2: boast devastating offensive powers or highly augmented physiologies, Medusa's power
Speaker 2: is all about her long red hair, which she can
Speaker 2: extend to double its normal six foot length, and most
Speaker 2: remarkably of all, control each strand as if it were
Speaker 2: a highly prehensile arm or tentacle. She can cause her
Speaker 2: scarlet locks to bundle together into reinforcing strands and accomplish
Speaker 2: everything from minor tool manipulation to intense physical combat with
Speaker 2: other superpowered individuals. Now as the excellent book Marvel Anatomy
Speaker 2: by Mark Sumerak and Daniel Wallace, with illustrations by Jonah
Speaker 2: Loebe points out Medusa's hair is just normal hair. It's
Speaker 2: perhaps fuller and longer than most human heads of hair,
Speaker 2: but its prehensile power stems not from its internal structure,
Speaker 2: which is just the standard cross linked kerat and protein filament,
Speaker 2: but from her own powerful psionic abilities. Yes, she has telekinesis,
Speaker 2: but can only control her own hair, and that's no
Speaker 2: slight against Medusa here. Think about it. The average human head,
Speaker 2: according to Harvard's Bio Numbers website, consists of between ninety
Speaker 2: thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand individual hairs, and
Speaker 2: we might position her at the upper end of that spectrum,
Speaker 2: even allotting for thicker hair shafts, as Sumac and Wallace suggest,
Speaker 2: even being rather conservative. Let's say she's using her brain
Speaker 2: to minutely control one hundred thousand strands of hair as
Speaker 2: if they were one hundred thousand additional arms. Assuming that
Speaker 2: her sonic powers emerged primarily through neural tissue, her brain
Speaker 2: is putting in quite a lot of work here, in
Speaker 2: addition to controlling her human limbs. Of course, remember that
Speaker 2: an octopus in order to control. Its own sophisticated system
Speaker 2: of grasping arms depends in part on intramuscular nerve cords
Speaker 2: that act as sort of many brains to provide partially
Speaker 2: independent action. So perhaps Medusa as well benefits from something
Speaker 2: akin to this. We might well assume her telekinetic powers
Speaker 2: rival those of Century or even those of the mighty
Speaker 2: Jeen Gray, only much more localized in range. But if
Speaker 2: telekinetic hair strand control is a heavy lift, what about
Speaker 2: the actual physical lift of picking up various objects and
Speaker 2: even superheroes with her telekinetically manipulated hair. This question is
Speaker 2: a good bit easier to nail down, as we know
Speaker 2: exactly how strong human hair is. As Tim Radford pointed
Speaker 2: out in a two thousand and four article for The Guardian,
Speaker 2: Secrets of Human Hair Unlocked at Natural History Museum in London,
Speaker 2: a single human hair strand can only sustain a weight
Speaker 2: of one hundred grams or three ounces, but when hair
Speaker 2: is woven together it can sustain much more, a fact
Speaker 2: that hair hangar aerialists have long exploited. In fact, if
Speaker 2: all the strands of hair on a typical human head
Speaker 2: were woven together, the resulting megabraid could hold twelve metric
Speaker 2: tons or the weight of two elephants. So the idea
Speaker 2: of Medusa coiling her braids and holding say, iron Man
Speaker 2: in place, isn't that far fetched, at least from a
Speaker 2: material standpoint. Interestingly enough, in the comics, as Queen of
Speaker 2: the Inhumans, Medusa's greatest strength is perhaps her diplomatic abilities,
Speaker 2: a reminder that while superpowered hair can move around superheroes,
Speaker 2: a well placed word can move mountains. Tune in for
Speaker 2: additional episodes of The Monster, Fact, The Artifact, or Animally
Speaker 2: a Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us
Speaker 2: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.