The Monstrefact: Marvel Comics’ Medusa

Cree to give them various emergent powers. While other inhumans boast devastating offensive powers or highly augmented physiologies, Medusa's power is all about her long red hair, which she can extend to double its normal six foot length, and most remarkably of all, control each strand as if it were a highly prehensile arm or tentacle. She can cause her scarlet locks to bundle together into reinforcing strands and accomplish everything from minor tool manipulation to intense physical combat with

other superpowered individuals. Now as the excellent book Marvel Anatomy by Mark Sumerak and Daniel Wallace, with illustrations by Jonah Loebe points out Medusa's hair is just normal hair. It's perhaps fuller and longer than most human heads of hair, but its prehensile power stems not from its internal structure, which is just the standard cross linked kerat and protein filament,

but from her own powerful psionic abilities. Yes, she has telekinesis, but can only control her own hair, and that's no slight against Medusa here. Think about it. The average human head, according to Harvard's Bio Numbers website, consists of between ninety thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand individual hairs, and we might position her at the upper end of that spectrum, even allotting for thicker hair shafts, as Sumac and Wallace suggest,

even being rather conservative. Let's say she's using her brain to minutely control one hundred thousand strands of hair as if they were one hundred thousand additional arms. Assuming that her sonic powers emerged primarily through neural tissue, her brain is putting in quite a lot of work here, in addition to controlling her human limbs. Of course, remember that

an octopus in order to control. Its own sophisticated system of grasping arms depends in part on intramuscular nerve cords that act as sort of many brains to provide partially independent action. So perhaps Medusa as well benefits from something akin to this. We might well assume her telekinetic powers rival those of Century or even those of the mighty

Jeen Gray, only much more localized in range. But if telekinetic hair strand control is a heavy lift, what about the actual physical lift of picking up various objects and even superheroes with her telekinetically manipulated hair. This question is a good bit easier to nail down, as we know

exactly how strong human hair is. As Tim Radford pointed out in a two thousand and four article for The Guardian, Secrets of Human Hair Unlocked at Natural History Museum in London, a single human hair strand can only sustain a weight of one hundred grams or three ounces, but when hair is woven together it can sustain much more, a fact

that hair hangar aerialists have long exploited. In fact, if all the strands of hair on a typical human head were woven together, the resulting megabraid could hold twelve metric tons or the weight of two elephants. So the idea of Medusa coiling her braids and holding say, iron Man in place, isn't that far fetched, at least from a

material standpoint. Interestingly enough, in the comics, as Queen of the Inhumans, Medusa's greatest strength is perhaps her diplomatic abilities, a reminder that while superpowered hair can move around superheroes, a well placed word can move mountains. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster, Fact, The Artifact, or Animally a Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.