article_snippet.sent: It is probably the most unpleasant experiment you will read about today: what happens when your skin starts to tear.
article_snippet.sent: Researchers have uncovered the reason why skin is so difficult to tear even when put under extreme pressures, by cutting samples of real skin and attempting to pull samples of real skin apart.
article_snippet.sent: Researchers found that rather than simply tearing, mammalian skin actually has sophisticated stress resistance properties that prevent holes and cuts from expanding.
article_snippet.sent: Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory cut real skin samples and then attempted to rip Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by pulling Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory apart (shown above)
article_snippet.sent: Using X-ray beams Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to directly observe the microscopic changes that take place in skin to help skin resist tearing during Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory stomach churning experiments.
article_snippet.sent: The findings help to explain why the thin layer of cells that cover our bodies is able to provide such an effective barrier to the outside world.
article_snippet.sent: Professor Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, who was one of the co-authors of the research, said: 'Professor Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, who was one of the co-authors of the research study is the first to model and directly observe in real time the micro-scale behavior of the collagen fibrils associated with the skin’s remarkable tear resistance. '
article_snippet.sent: To conduct the experiment the researchers used the skin taken from dead rabbits, carefully removed the hair and placed the hair in equipment designed to pull the skin taken from dead rabbits apart.
article_snippet.sent: the researchers then cut a small notch or hole in the skin taken from dead rabbits and watched how the skin taken from dead rabbits changed shape as the skin taken from dead rabbits was stretched in a way intended to cause the tear to increase.
article_snippet.sent: The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Nature Communications, then used the x-ray beams produced by the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to study the structural changes that took place in the skin.
article_snippet.sent: Research on skin's mechanical properties dates back nearly 200 years, when physicians began examining stab wounds.
article_snippet.sent: For example, the mechanistic understanding we’ve identified in skin could be applied to the improvement of artificial skin, or to the development of thin film polymers for applications such as flexible electronics.'
highlights_snippet.sent: Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used real skin samples to study microscopic changes that resist tears when pulled apart .
  