Breaking News English
Home | Help This Site
Stress really does turn your hair grey
Slowest
Slower
Medium
Faster
Fastest
MY e-BOOK
See a sample
More Listening
READING:
Scientists found that stress turns hair grey in mice. Stem cell biologists from Harvard tested mice to find how stress affected them. The scientists injected the mice with the heat-giving ingredient in chili peppers. This caused a hair-colouring chemical in the mice to overwork in reaction to the stress. It used up all colour-regenerating cells. The mice’s hair quickly turned white. A researcher said this was, «beyond what I imagined».
People have always believed that stress turns hair grey. France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair supposedly turned white before she was beheaded. More recently, the hair of presidents have quickly lost colour. The strains of leadership have gone to the roots and follicles. The researcher said the loss of the colour-regenerating cells cannot be reversed. She said: «The damage is permanent.» She thinks stress could also accelerate the aging process.
Higher Levels
Try higher levels. The listening is a little longer, with more vocabulary.
Breaking News English Lesson on Greying Hair
Home | Help This Site
Stress really does turn your hair grey (26th January, 2020)
LISTEN
MATCH
SPELL
WORDS
SEE MORE.
Scientists found that stress turns hair grey in mice. Stem cell biologists from Harvard tested mice to find how stress affected them. The scientists injected the mice with the heat-giving ingredient in chili peppers. This caused a hair-colouring chemical in the mice to overwork in reaction to the stress. It used up all colour-regenerating cells. The mice’s hair quickly turned white. A researcher said this was, «beyond what I imagined».
People have always believed that stress turns hair grey. France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair supposedly turned white before she was beheaded. More recently, the hair of presidents have quickly lost colour. The strains of leadership have gone to the roots and follicles. The researcher said the loss of the colour-regenerating cells cannot be reversed. She said: «The damage is permanent.» She thinks stress could also accelerate the aging process.
Try the same news story at these levels:
News
«Much has been said and written on the utility of newspapers; but one principal advantage which might be derived from these publications has been neglected; we mean that of reading them in schools.»
The Portland Eastern Herald (June 8, 1795)
«News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form, and. history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.»
Mark Twain, in his autobiography (1906)
«Current events provide authentic learning experiences for students at all grade levels. In studying current events, students are required to use a range of cognitive, affective, critical thinking and research skills.»
Haas, M. and Laughlin, M. (2000) Teaching Current Events: It’s Status in Social Studies Today.
Buy my 1,000 Ideas and Activities for Language Teachers eBook. It has hundreds of ideas, activity templates, reproducible activities, and more.
Breaking News English
Home | Help This Site
All 3 Graded Readings
Stress really does turn your hair grey
Scientists found that stress turns hair grey in mice. Stem cell biologists from Harvard tested mice to find how stress affected them. The scientists injected the mice with the heat-giving ingredient in chili peppers. This caused a hair-colouring chemical in the mice to overwork in reaction to the stress. It used up all colour-regenerating cells. The mice’s hair quickly turned white. A researcher said this was, «beyond what I imagined».
People have always believed that stress turns hair grey. France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair supposedly turned white before she was beheaded. More recently, the hair of presidents have quickly lost colour. The strains of leadership have gone to the roots and follicles. The researcher said the loss of the colour-regenerating cells cannot be reversed. She said: «The damage is permanent.» She thinks stress could also accelerate the aging process.
SPEED READING
Speed 1 | Speed 2 | Speed 3 | Speed 4
MORE
Scientists have found that stress turns our hair grey, white or silver in mice. Stem cell biologists from Harvard University did a series of tests on mice to find the effects of stress on them. The scientists injected the mice with the ingredient in chili peppers that gives them their heat. This made the mice stressed. It caused a hair-colouring pigment in the mice to overwork as a reaction to the stress. It used up all colour-regenerating stem cells and the mice’s hair rapidly turned white. A researcher said: «The detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined.»
For centuries, people have believed that stress turns hair grey. France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair supposedly turned white the night before she was beheaded during the French Revolution. More recently, the hair of presidents and other world leaders have quickly lost colour. The strains of leadership have gone to the roots of things, especially hair follicles. The researcher said the loss of the pigment-regenerating stem cells cannot be reversed. She said: «You can’t regenerate pigment any more. The damage is permanent.» She thinks stress could accelerate the aging process.
SPEED READING
Speed 1 | Speed 2 | Speed 3 | Speed 4
MORE
People have wondered for centuries about the link between stress and greying hair. It is believed that France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white the night before she was beheaded during the French Revolution in the late-eighteenth century. More recently, we have witnessed the locks of presidents and other world leaders quickly lose colour. The strains of leadership seem to go to the roots of things, especially hair follicles. Professor Hsu said the loss of the pigment-regenerating stem cells cannot be reversed. She said: «Once they’re gone, you can’t regenerate pigment any more. The damage is permanent.» Worryingly, she hypothesised that stress could be responsible for accelerating the aging process.
SPEED READING
Speed 1 | Speed 2 | Speed 3 | Speed 4
MORE
MY e-BOOK
See a sample
How Stress Causes Gray Hair: Harvard Scientists Solve a Biological Puzzle
By Harvard University January 23, 2020
Elaborate sympathetic innervation (magenta) around melanocyte stem cells (yellow). Acute stress induces hyperactivation of the sympathetic nervous system to release large amount of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Norepinephrine drives rapid depletion of melanocyte stem cells and hair greying. Credit: Hsu Laboratory, Harvard University
Harvard Scientists Uncover Link Between the Nervous System and Stem Cells That Regenerate Pigment
When Marie Antoinette was captured during the French Revolution, her hair reportedly turned white overnight. In more recent history, John McCain experienced severe injuries as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War — and lost color in his hair.
For a long time, anecdotes have connected stressful experiences with the phenomenon of hair graying.
Now, for the first time, HSCI scientists have discovered exactly how the process plays out: stress activates nerves that are part of the fight-or-flight response, which in turn cause permanent damage to pigment-regenerating stem cells in hair follicles.
The study, published in Nature on January 22, 2020, advances scientists’ knowledge of how stress can impact the body.
“Everyone has an anecdote to share about how stress affects their body, particularly in their skin and hair — the only tissues we can see from the outside,” said senior author Ya-Chieh Hsu, the Alvin and Esta Star Associate Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard and HSCI principal faculty member. “We wanted to understand if this connection is true, and if so, how stress leads to changes in diverse tissues. Hair pigmentation is such an accessible and tractable system to start with — and besides, we were genuinely curious to see if stress indeed leads to hair graying. ”
Narrowing down the culprit
Because stress affects the whole body, researchers first had to narrow down which body system was responsible for connecting stress to hair color. The team first hypothesized that stress causes an immune attack on pigment-producing cells. However, when mice lacking immune cells still showed hair graying, researchers turned to the hormone cortisol. But once more, it was a dead end.
Infographic depicting how stem cells are depleted in response to stress, causing hair to turn gray in mice. Credit: Judy Blomquist, Harvard University
“Stress always elevates levels of the hormone cortisol in the body, so we thought that cortisol might play a role,” Hsu said. “But surprisingly, when we removed the adrenal gland from the mice so that they couldn’t produce cortisol-like hormones, their hair still turned gray under stress.”
After systematically eliminating different possibilities, researchers honed in on the sympathetic nerve system, which is responsible for the body’s fight-or-flight response.
Sympathetic nerves branch out into each hair follicle on the skin. The researchers found that stress causes these nerves to release the chemical norepinephrine, which gets taken up by nearby pigment-regenerating stem cells.
Permanent damage
In the hair follicle, certain stem cells act as a reservoir of pigment-producing cells. When hair regenerates, some of the stem cells convert into pigment-producing cells that color the hair.
Researchers found that the norepinephrine from sympathetic nerves causes the stem cells to activate excessively. The stem cells all convert into pigment-producing cells, prematurely depleting the reservoir.
“When we started to study this, I expected that stress was bad for the body — but the detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined,” Hsu said. “After just a few days, all of the pigment-regenerating stem cells were lost. Once they’re gone, you can’t regenerate pigments anymore. The damage is permanent.”
The finding underscores the negative side effects of an otherwise protective evolutionary response, the researchers said.
“Acute stress, particularly the fight-or-flight response, has been traditionally viewed to be beneficial for an animal’s survival. But in this case, acute stress causes permanent depletion of stem cells,” said postdoctoral fellow Bing Zhang, the lead author of the study.
Answering a fundamental question
To connect stress with hair graying, the researchers started with a whole-body response and progressively zoomed into individual organ systems, cell-to-cell interaction and, eventually, all the way down to molecular dynamics. The process required a variety of research tools along the way, including methods to manipulate organs, nerves, and cell receptors.
“To go from the highest level to the smallest detail, we collaborated with many scientists across a wide range of disciplines, using a combination of different approaches to solve a very fundamental biological question,” Zhang said.
The collaborators included Isaac Chiu, assistant professor of immunology at Harvard Medical School who studies the interplay between nervous and immune systems.
“We know that peripheral neurons powerfully regulate organ function, blood vessels, and immunity, but less is known about how they regulate stem cells,” Chiu said.
“With this study, we now know that neurons can control stem cells and their function, and can explain how they interact at the cellular and molecular level to link stress with hair graying.”
The findings can help illuminate the broader effects of stress on various organs and tissues. This understanding will pave the way for new studies that seek to modify or block the damaging effects of stress. Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has filed a provisional patent application on the lab’s findings and is engaging prospective commercial partners who may be interested in clinical and cosmetic applications.
“By understanding precisely how stress affects stem cells that regenerate pigment, we’ve laid the groundwork for understanding how stress affects other tissues and organs in the body,” Hsu said. “Understanding how our tissues change under stress is the first critical step towards eventual treatment that can halt or revert the detrimental impact of stress. We still have a lot to learn in this area.”
Discover more
Reference: “Hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells” by Bing Zhang, Sai Ma, Inbal Rachmin, Megan He, Pankaj Baral, Sekyu Choi, William A. Gonçalves, Yulia Shwartz, Eva M. Fast, Yiqun Su, Leonard I. Zon, Aviv Regev, Jason D. Buenrostro, Thiago M. Cunha, Isaac M. Chiu, David E. Fisher and Ya-Chieh Hsu, 22 January 2020, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1935-3
The study was supported by the Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Harvard/ MIT Basic Neuroscience Grants Program, Harvard FAS and HMS Dean’s Award, American Cancer Society, NIH, the Charles A. King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and an HSCI junior faculty grant.
Breaking News English Lesson on Greying Hair
Home | Help This Site
Stress really does turn your hair grey (26th January, 2020)
LISTEN
MATCH
SPELL
WORDS
SEE MORE.
Scientists have found that stress turns our hair grey, white or silver in mice. Stem cell biologists from Harvard University did a series of tests on mice to find the effects of stress on them. The scientists injected the mice with the ingredient in chili peppers that gives them their heat. This made the mice stressed. It caused a hair-colouring pigment in the mice to overwork as a reaction to the stress. It used up all colour-regenerating stem cells and the mice’s hair rapidly turned white. A researcher said: «The detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined.»
For centuries, people have believed that stress turns hair grey. France’s Queen Marie Antoinette’s hair supposedly turned white the night before she was beheaded during the French Revolution. More recently, the hair of presidents and other world leaders have quickly lost colour. The strains of leadership have gone to the roots of things, especially hair follicles. The researcher said the loss of the pigment-regenerating stem cells cannot be reversed. She said: «You can’t regenerate pigment any more. The damage is permanent.» She thinks stress could accelerate the aging process.
Try the same news story at these levels:
News
«Much has been said and written on the utility of newspapers; but one principal advantage which might be derived from these publications has been neglected; we mean that of reading them in schools.»
The Portland Eastern Herald (June 8, 1795)
«News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form, and. history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.»
Mark Twain, in his autobiography (1906)
«Current events provide authentic learning experiences for students at all grade levels. In studying current events, students are required to use a range of cognitive, affective, critical thinking and research skills.»
Haas, M. and Laughlin, M. (2000) Teaching Current Events: It’s Status in Social Studies Today.
Buy my 1,000 Ideas and Activities for Language Teachers eBook. It has hundreds of ideas, activity templates, reproducible activities, and more.
Источники информации:
- http://breakingnewsenglish.com/2001/200126-grey-hair-4.html
- http://breakingnewsenglish.com/2001/200126-grey-hair-r.html
- http://scitechdaily.com/how-stress-causes-gray-hair-harvard-scientists-solve-a-biological-puzzle/
- http://breakingnewsenglish.com/2001/200126-grey-hair-5.html
1) Вставьте слово, которое грамматически будет соответствовать содержанию текста.
As old as a brontosaurus
As we walked around the Prehistoric Park in Calgary, I had my six-year-old son, Jordie, pose for a picture with a brontosaurus in the background. After I took the photo, I ___ (NOT CAN) help crying.
2) Вставьте слово, которое грамматически будет соответствовать содержанию текста.
«What’s wrong, Mom?» Jordie asked. I explained that when I was his age, my parents had taken my picture standing in exactly the same spot, and I was feeling rather nostalgic. I added that perhaps one day he ___ (TAKE) his son’s picture here.
3) Вставьте слово, которое грамматически будет соответствовать содержанию текста.
Puzzled, he looked several times from the brontosaurus to ___ (I).
4) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Your Future World
What will you be doing in 2025? Will you be living in an undersea research station? Will you be the chief engineer ___ a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean?
1) inventing
2) designing
3) scheming
4) doing
5) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Will you be leading an ___ to the planet Mars? Will you be …?
1) exploration
2) expenditure
3) expedition
4) exhibit
6) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
You can daydream, of course, but nobody knows exactly what the world will be ___. But scientists have made some guesses.
1) like
2) alike
3) likely
4) likable
7) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Based on the advances made, they believe people will be healthier. Diphtheria, malaria, tuberculosis, polio and many other killers are under control now. These diseases are on the way out, ___ to germ-killing chemicals,…
1) as a result
2) because
3) on account
4) thanks
Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
… new ways of finding out about our bodies, and new ways of providing clean, safe ___ and water.
1) eat
2) feed
3) food
4) cooking
9) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Healthier people live longer, so we can expect the world’s population to ___ sharply. It may double in the next forty years! This brings up a serious problem: how will we find food, water, and minerals for such a huge population?
1) decrease
2) distract
3) dissolve
4) increase
10) Запишите в поле ответа цифру 1, 2, 3 или 4, соответствующую выбранному Вами варианту ответа.
Scientists are at work on some ___.
1) solutions
2) alternatives
3) preferences
4) questions
For centuries, stories have been told of people whose hair turned prematurely white from harrowing stress. Now, Harvard researchers have found a scientific explanation.
«Marie Antoinette syndrome» is the term commonly used to for the rapid, premature graying, because legend has it that the French queen’s hair turned white the night before she faced the guillotine.
Mice get «Marie Antoinette syndrome» when they’re highly stressed, too, so Harvard researchers studied them to figure out how stress can induce a permanent loss of hair pigment.
«We started by thinking maybe the immune system is involved,» says Harvard stem cell scientist Ya-Chieh Hsu. The hypothesis was that under stress, the immune system attacks the stem cells that generate hair pigment cells.
But when the researchers tested it in mice with defective immune systems that couldn’t attack, «They still got gray hairs under stress — so that’s incorrect,» Hsu says.
Next hypothesis: that the stress hormone cortisol was killing the pigment stem cells. The research team tried removing the adrenal glands that make cortisol, but the mice still developed gray hair.
«So we know that cortisol is not involved,» Hsu says.
Finally, the research team focused on the sympathetic nervous system — the network of nerves best known for the «fight-or-flight» response to danger. Hsu says it just didn’t seem like a likely candidate, even though it gets activated by stress, because the fight-or-flight response is temporary.
But now it’s clear that «a very transient fight-or flight response can lead to permanent changes in stem cells,» she says. «That is a much bigger effect than what we would initially anticipate.»
The research finds that during stress, the sympathetic nervous system over-activates and so depletes the stem cells that make pigment cells. No more pigment cells — no more hair color.
The paper is just out in the journal Nature.
William Lowry, a biology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies hair follicles, says we’ve long known there’s a connection between stress and graying hair, but not what it was.
«This paper really nails that, in the sense of figuring out what different types of systems in your body come together» to produce the effect, he says.
And that mechanism could apply to more than hair, Lowry says.
«Is this happening in different organs? Is this the canary in the coal mine?» he asks. «I think — sure. There’s no reason to think that this is a one-off.»
Ya-Chieh Hsu at Harvard says the hope is that understanding how stress harms stem cells could lead to ways to block that harm.
Also — it’s not clear whether the stress mechanism that turns hair white is the same as the normal graying that comes with age, but if it is, there could be a way to block that, too.
In 1902, the British Medical Journal reported an unusual case of rapid hair whitening.
A 22-year-old woman “witnessed a tragedy of a woman’s throat being cut and the victim falling dead at her feet,” according to a physician at the London Temperance Hospital. The next day, the right side of her pubic hair turned white, while the left half remained black.
This historic case study makes for a terribly weird (and rapid) example of an otherwise common occurrence: gray hairs seem to accumulate when we’re stressed. And it’s not just random violence that sends people’s pigment running—college exams, children, and work pressure appear to change our coloring, too. But for millennia, scholars have been relying mostly on anecdotal proof and intuition to rationalize this phenomenon. In the absence of clear evidence, many scientists did not believe stress could turn hair snow white, instead arguing the change must be triggered by chemicals or strange immune system behavior. Rare cases where doctors observed the rapid whitening—like in the 1902 BMJ study—were a source of endless consternation.
A recent paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, may put some of these arguments to rest. In the study, stem cell and regenerative biologists from the United States and Brazil reported that stress can indeed cause hair to lose its pigment—and they identified a cellular pathway by which it can occur.
To study this vexing relationship, the researchers created an elaborate animal model, which basically involved trying to turn black-haired rats white with lab-made stressors. They tried three different tactics: restraint stress, chronic unpredictable stress, and nociception-induced stress, which is caused by physical pain (or the threat of it). Each successfully turned the rat’s hair white. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nociception-induced stress, which the scientists stimulated by injecting the rats with resiniferatoxin, an analogue of the chili pepper compound capsaicin, worked best and fastest.
Having identified the optimal way to make a rat panic, the team began searching for corresponding changes in the physiological pathways that give rise to coat color. They were particularly interested in the behaviors of two types of cells: differentiated melanocytes, which produce pigment in the hair and skin, and melanocyte stem cells, the raw material from which melanocytes develop. To observe each one independently, the researchers injected their tiny test subjects with the hot pepper-like substance when the rats’ fur was actively growing. At that point in the hair growth cycle, differentiated melanocytes naturally cluster in the hair bulb, while melanocyte stem cells gather together in a separate space called the bulge.
For five days after the injection, the rats’ coats remained black. The differentiated melanocytes in the hair bulb continued to pump out color. But in many follicles, the overtaxed melanocyte stem cells were “completely lost,” the researchers report. Pushed by a flood of noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter that surges in response to stress, the existing stem cells proliferated so quickly that they completely disappeared from their niche. The next time the rats’ coat grew, there were no melanocyte stem cells in these damaged follicles, so white hairs sprouted.
“In just a few days, the reservoir of pigment-regenerating stem cells [was] depleted,” Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard and the study’s senior author, told PopSci in an email. The loss was permanent. “And once they’re gone, pigment cannot be generated anymore.”
“This is an exquisitely elegant paper unrevealing an important mechanism of hair graying,” Alexey Terskikh, who researches development, aging, and regeneration at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, wrote via email.
But there are many other ways hair can lose its color. A 2018 paper suggested an overactive immune response can also destroy melanocytes and melanocyte stem cells in rats, bleaching their coat. Certain skin cancer drugs turn some patients’ hair transparent. Doctors think it’s a sign their bodies are responding positively to the drug. Genetic pathways, environmental pathways, and mutations can also play a role, according to Terskikh.
Hair still holds many secrets. We don’t know why hair loss plays out differently on someone’s scalp than on their face or, for that matter, their back. And, unfortunately for the anonymous Englishwoman with world-famous pubes, doctors still don’t agree about canities subita, the contested phenomenon where hair blanches seemingly overnight. But, in many cases, scientists are narrowing in on answers. In recent years, there’s been a surge in research and development for anti-balding solutions—and many of them show promise. Terskikh, for his part, is working on regenerating hair from scratch using things like pluripotent stem cells. If it works, we’ll have an unlimited supply of hair—presumably in every shade.