This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Long ago, before band-aids or even medicine of any kind,

our ancestors evolved to heal cuts themselves. If he got sliced open, the body

blocked it up to prevent blood loss, water loss, infection. But as we gained that power, we

sacrificed something else.

So we've evolved to heal very quickly or as quickly as possible

at the expense of regenerating skin the way it used to be.

George Katsarellis, a skin biologist at the University of Pennsylvania,

who studies that newly healed skin,

also known as scars.

And the feature of scars is that they don't have

hair follicles, sweat glands, or fat.

In that observation lies a clue, which Katsorear Ellis and his team investigated in mice.

They found that when mice were injured,

hair follicles sometimes regenerated at the wound site.

And where hair cells appeared, fat cells did too, the fat that sits under normal skin as a cushion.

The bottom line is that the follicle has these almost magical powers where it's it's really normalizing the skin architecture.

Meaning hair cells are a good thing for reducing scarring.

In their latest work in the journal Science they isolated a growth factor called

BMP from the hair follicles. It's a signal the follicles send to

neighboring cells. They then exposed human scar cells to BMP in a dish.

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