Documentary
SYNOPSIS
This documentary is a deep scientific look into the world of melanin. Melanin has always been known to be the primary factor regarding the skin colour of a human being, this film aims to travel deeper into this and to explore what other truths exists in this vast topic.
RESEARCH
There are three basic types of melanin: eumelanin, pheomelanin, and neuromelanin.
2 different types: Chlorophyll(no iron only magnesium) and Carbon based substance
There are two types of eumelanin, which are brown eumelanin and black eumelanin. Those two types of eumelanin chemically differ from each other in their pattern of polymeric bonds. A small amount of black eumelanin in the absence of other pigments causes grey hair.
A small amount of brown eumelanin in the absence of other pigments causes yellow (blond) hair. Melanin is an excellent conductor of electricity and due to its impressively high boiling point of between 450 to 550 degrees celsius, due to the strong bonds it has on a molecular level. Alessandro Pezzella is the head of a current study regarding the possibilities of specifically eumelanin.
What Pezzella and his colleagues did in the new study was to put films of synthetic eumelanin through annealing by heating eumelanin sheets under high vacuum to straighten them up.
It is similar to hair straightening under an iron, but here the researchers used pigment. “Our process produced a billion-fold increase in the electrical conductivity of eumelanin,” the researchers said.
