February 14, 2002
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Old Wives' Tales
The sound you heard last night at about 8:30 was my jaw hitting the floor, as one of the characters on Enterprise uttered one of the silliest things I've ever heard on a TV show. Two characters are stranded in a shuttlepod with only a couple days of air left. One begins shaving, saying an officer always looks his best, and when their bodies are found he wants to be clean-shaven.
The other guy points out that, "if I remember my honors biology class correctly, your hair keeps growing after you die. I think that includes your beard." Now let's think about this for about a microsecond. What happens to your body when you die? Your heart stops. That means there are no cells in your body receiving oxygen and nutrients.
Without those things cells can last a little while, but not very long. Resource-intensive cells like those found in the brain exhaust their reserves in about four minutes, after that they're irretrievable. Other cells can go a little while longer, depending on how active they are. I'm guessing the cells in the follicles need quite a bit of energy to make the hairs grow, so they may not last more than a couple hours.
Now there's also some contraction of the skin as it dries out -- basically the reverse process of a sponge swelling up when you soak it. Combined those things may give you some five-o-clock shadow after you cash in your chips. But the guy in the show implied he'd look like a mountain man when they were found.
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