But even though melanin is mighty, it can't shield you all by itself.
That's why your skin gets tan if you spend a lot of time in the sun. When you go out into the sun, these cells make extra melanin to protect you from getting burned by the sun's ultraviolet, or UV, rays. The darker your skin is, the more melanin you have. Most of the cells in your epidermis (95%) work to make new skin cells.Īnd what about the other 5%? They make a substance called melanin (say: MEL-uh-nun). Your epidermis is always making new skin cells that rise to the top to replace the old ones. That's almost 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of cells every year! But don't think your skin might wear out someday. So just in the time it took you to read this far, you've probably lost about 40,000 cells. Though you can't see it happening, every minute of the day we lose about 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells off the surface of our skin. But they only stick around for a little while. These old cells are tough and strong, just right for covering your body and protecting it. What you see on your hands (and everywhere else on your body) are really dead skin cells. As newer cells continue to move up, older cells near the top die and rise to the surface of your skin.
This trip takes about 2 weeks to a month. When the cells are ready, they start moving toward the top of your epidermis. At the bottom of the epidermis, new skin cells are forming. Even though you can't see anything happening, your epidermis is hard at work. The epidermis is the part of your skin you can see. The layer on the outside is called the epidermis (say: eh-pih-DUR-mis). The skin is made up of three layers, each with its own important parts. helps keep our bodies at just the right temperature.Without skin, people's muscles, bones, and organs would be hanging out all over the place. It covers and protects everything inside your body. No matter how you think of it, your skin is very important.
Time for these guys to answer for their actions.You might be surprised to find out it's the skin, which you might not think of as an organ. The worst impacts of climate change are all but here. After decades of industry’s self-interested lies, countries all over the world are scrambling to stave off wildfires, catastrophic flooding, deadly heat, and dire drought.
These companies and their lobby groups must be held accountable for the harm they have caused-for dismissing the threat of global warming and dramatically increasing greenhouse gas emissions with full knowledge of the dangers posed by the delay they promoted. This is an appalling waste of public money at a time when the United States needs to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, stop drilling on our public lands and in our public waters, and transition to clean energy. The fossil fuel industry currently receives more than $20 billion a year in taxpayer handouts that incentivize dirty and dangerous drilling in communities across the country. It is long past time for this industry to stop deceiving the public.Īnd it’s time for us to stop subsidizing them-literally helping them harm to us. This opposition from Big Oil and others in the fossil fuel industry is a major reason why the United States and other nations across the globe haven’t reduced emissions sufficiently to stave off the worst impacts of global warming. Oil companies have also lobbied against strong rules to cut emissions from tailpipes and most recently revealed, in an undercover video filmed by Greenpeace UK, that it planned to work to preserve taxpayer handouts for drilling. In 1979 the National Academy of Scientists warned that a “wait-and-see” approach to carbon pollution from fossil fuels “may mean waiting until it is too late.” Despite such warnings, well known to Big Oil managers, these companies mounted a decades-long effort to block policies to transition to clean energy.ĮxxonMobil, along with other multinationals like Chevron, successfully lobbied to block legislation to reduce climate pollution, led by Congress members Henry Waxman and Ed Markey in 2010. Despite knowing about the threats fossil fuels posed, major oil companies fostered our dependence on them, acted to mislead the public and lawmakers about the threat, and blocked action to confront the problem.
Chamber of Commerce will testify as well.Ĭlimate change poses a profound threat to the earth and its people. The American Petroleum Institute (API) and the U.S. The heads of four multinational oil companies-ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell- will appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform to be questioned about decades of misstatements and misleading industry campaigns about climate change.