The Science of Skin, Skin Disorders and Skin Cancer

为什么蜜蜂嗡嗡声?因为他们不知道这句话! But it looks like the planet earth might hum as well - at frequency of around 2 to 7 milihertz - way beneath the threshold of human hearing. And until now, scientists were baffled as to how this noise was produced. Most intriguingly, the noise seems to come from the oceans and not the land. According to two scientists from California, Junkee Rhie and Barbara Romanowicz, the hum is the result of storm energy in the pacific and southern oceans being converted into infragravity waves - very spaceage sounding. Powerful sea waves generate these infragravity waves during storms, and some of the wave energy gets converted to seismic waves on the seafloor. It is these seismic waves that make the noise, by an interaction between the atmosphere, ocean and sea floor. The team measured seismic energy emitted by the earth, and found that the hum mainly comes from the seas during the most stormy seasons, confirming their ideas. Scarily, this energy is the equivalent of an earthquake measuring about 6 on the Richter scale being released every day !

TV is ultrahigh frequency, and once Tony Blair's got his way, we'll all be using digital TV anyway so you won't be able to use your analogue radio to listen to your TV/radio anyway because it will be in the wrong format, unless of course you've got a digital radio.

I'm not aware of any effects of magnets on blood flow, but they can be used to measure blood flow, in a technique called MRI - Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This works by putting someone in a very strong strong magnet, and under those magnetic conditions all the water molecules in the body line up in a straight line. The scanner then sends a pulse of radio waves which disrupts some the water molecules, some of the hydrogen actually, and they flip into a different orientation, and then flip back, producing a signal which enables you to measure what the tissue looks like in an Magnetic Resonance Scan. You can also do this to measure blood flow using a process referred to as MRA or Magnetic Resonance Angiography.

Athletes foot is really very common - if you took 100 young men who do a lot of sport the vast majority of them have athlete's foot. If you are a young man who does a lot spot and you check between the 3rd and 4th toe and find a little bit of skin flaking in-between the toes, that's athlete's foot. That's caused by another bug that lives on the skin - another fungus, that spreads from person to person. You can leave little bits on the floor if you do have this, so I suppose you could catch this form somebody else, but it takes up home in those nooks and crannies where air doesn't circulate so that's particularly common between the toes. Now if someone has got a really bad case of athlete's foot they will have some of this fungus but they may also have some extra bacteria that have got in through the soft mushy skin. So if they've got really bad feet there are some treatments that can be used to get rid of the extra trouble makers - the bacteria, and also the athletes foot fungus that's the cause in the first place.

Birthmarks are marks that appear at birth. There are two main types; blood vessel mark like President Gorbechav had on top of his head. The other sort of common birth mark, is a big brown mole which can be present at birth. They can come in all sorts of sizes, from just a few millimetres across to many centimetres - 10cm or more. Most people are born with very many moles, and you tend to develop them as you grow up. Most moles are developed during childhood, but there's often a boost in the number during puberty, and some during early adulthood, but not very many tend to develop later on in life.

We all get wrinkly as we age - they come because our skin gets less elastic as we get older. If you get look at a child's skin it has plenty of stretch and twang, but an older person's skin doesn't have this. As you get older your skin gets saggy, and loses its elasticity, causing wrinkles. Creams on the market can help with the really small wrinkles, but the deep ones, of the sort you can see a couple of feet away, I'm afraid, creams won't do anything for those. Things that you can do of course, are not go out in the sun, particularly when you're young, and not smoke. If you look at smokers, particularly women, they can be incredibly wrinkled. It's not known quite how that happens, but it is thought that it may be a chemical reaction in the skin and may also be a genetic predisposition in some people.

Certainly some people experience skin reactions related to certain components of their diet. The commonest manifestations are swelling and utricarial reactions (like nettle rash), but eczema can also be triggered this way. If the case is severe then it is probably sensible for a sufferer to undergo sensitivity or "prick" testing whereby a small amount of different potential allergens are left in contact with the skin surface to see which ones provoke a red "flare" reaction consistent with an allergic response. Food items containing that allergen can then be avoided, which can help to improve skin symptoms. But in mild cases full scale sensitivity testing like this is probably not necessary. Instead a "trial and error" approach can be used, with possible causative food items being eliminated from the diet one at a time. If after a certain food is withdrawn the symptoms improve this substance may be the culprit. To find out for sure, reintroduce the item to see whether the skin symptoms return.