I finished reading Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls:True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors by Sterling Seagrave. A truly fascinating book for those of you who like harrowing stories of survival against impossible odds and mind-bogglingly gruesome conditions.

If you liked Endurance, or Alive or even Robinson Crusoe, this is the book for you. Except that it's not just one incredible true story, it's a compilation of them, so just when you've picked up your jaw off the floor after reading one account of a Desperate Journey, then there comes an even *more *incredible tale of an Abandoned Soul that blows your mind completely. And so on. I could not put it down, and it's a thick book.

Anyway, I've been on an island theme in my reading material for some time now. I'd link to the Jack London post I wrote some time back, except I just realized while looking for it that it's one of the *many* posts that I haven't yet transferred over into the new blog. SIgh, I only have about a quarter of my entries available here, the rest need to be copied and pasted by hand, one by one, into the Moveable Type blog interface. Yeah....a real project. Argh.

Suffice it to say that I've been reading island-themed books for several months now, and I've got quite a list going. The above is just one in the series:

• An Island to Oneself: Six Years on a Desert Island
• Castaway in Paradise: The Incredible Adventures of True-Life Robinson Crusoes
• Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls : True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors
• Life of Pi
• Rain and Other South Sea Stories
• Robinson Crusoe
• Searching for Paradise : A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands...
• Shoal of Time a History of the Hawaiian Islands
• South Sea Tales
• Tales of the South Seas: Island Landfalls, the Ebb-Tide, the Wrecker
• The Cruise of the Snark: Jack London's South Sea Adventure
• The Devil's Teeth : A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks
• The Log of the Snark
• The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

and that's just some of them.

In my reading of numerous shipwreck survivor accounts, I've noticed something curious. In the "Desperate Journeys" book, for example, there's a story of a guy whose ship goes down, and after nearly dying of thirst and hunger at sea, he washes up on a tiny scrap of reef with barely any dry land, no vegetation, and no respite from the burning equatorial sun. He somehow barely survives for over 2 years on crabs and algae and occasional fish before being rescued, always on the verge of death from starvation and thirst. I forget how he managed to get any water.

One of the biggest problems is no shade. He is burnt to a crisp without any shade all day long, day after day.

When he is finally picked up and rescued, he has grown a thick layer of hair over his skin that helps protect him from the sun's burning rays, and the cold at night as well. The rescuers describe him as looking like a wild animal, his hair is almost like fur.

This same phenomenon is described in several other castaway stories as well. The castaways are usually very *hairy* when found, not just bearded, but actually posessing a coat of hair over their bodies that is thicker than normal. This only seems to happen for those castaways that were shipwrecked without clothing, or whose clothes have rotted off and haven't found anything else to protect them from the sun.

So my question is: is there something in intense UV exposure that triggers protective hair growth? I know that anorexic girls often grow an unusually thick coat of hair on their bodies under starvation conditions. It replaces the insulating body fat that normally protects them from variations in temperature. So under conditions of starvation AND intense UV exposure, it does make sense that some pathway for protective body hair growth would be switched on.

And if we could find that pathway trigger, we might be able to switch body hair growth on or off. Without starving or being burnt to a crisp by the sun, of course.

Considering that hair removal is a zillion-dollar industry, and hair *growth* (for men) is booming as well, this could be very lucrative research. Rather than shaving and lasering and moving hair around from one part of your head to another, wouldn't it be great to just be able to turn your hair growth on or off?

Well, if I ever win the lottery and become a venture capitalist, that will be something to look into. After I solve world hunger and establish peace on earth, of course.