Your fingers wrinkle the same way every time you're in the water too long

Summary

Sometimes it takes a kid to ask a question no one has considered before. Guy German is an associate professor and director of the Watson School's Biomedical Engineering Department. He couldn't decide between astrophysics and genetics when he was applying to college, so he flipped a coin! Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen. Guy German is an associate professor and director of the Watson School's Biomedical Engineering Department. He couldn't decide between astrophysics and genetics when he was applying to college, so he flipped a coin! Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen. × A couple of years ago, Binghamton University Associate Professor Guy German published research about why human skin wrinkles when you stay in the water too long. Received wisdom held that the water swelled your skin and made your fingers wrinkly, but little to no research had been done to prove that. What German and his team at the Biological Soft Matter Mechanics Laboratory found is that blood vessels beneath the skin actually contract after prolonged immersion, and that’s where the wrinkles come from. He wrote about the research for The Conversation — a nonprofit news organization that asks academics to share their expertise on current topics — as part of its Curious Kids feature. One of the follow-up questions stumped him, though. “A student asked, ‘Yeah, but do the wrinkles always form in the same way?’ And I thought: I haven’t the foggiest clue!” said German, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. “So it led to this research to find out.” In a paper recently published in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, German and Rachel Laytin ’23, MS ’24, show that, yes, the topography patterns remain constant after multiple immersions. “Blood vessels don’t change their position much — they move around a bit, but in relation to other blood vessels, they’re pretty static,” German said. “That means the wrink...