13 ms·
Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent
- sschueller 2y ago> while smearing it on the rodent’s scalp allowed scientists to see blood vessels in the animal’s brain. Since when do mice not have skulls?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- griffzhowl 2y agoMy thought too but later in the article it says that was by using the dye in combination with laser speckle imaging (whatever that is)
- dylan604 2y agoEveryone knows skulls are transparent in everything except x-rays. It is known
- mattkrause 2y agoMouse skulls are very thin and you can sometimes image directly through them!
- Intralexical 2y agoThe article says they used laser speckle imaging for the brain test.
- _Microft 2y agoPaper: „Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules“, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm6869 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm6869
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoAh, it "reduce[s] the [refractive index] contrast between water and lipids, leading to optical transparency of live biological tissues." Craziest part being it was predicted using a classical optical model [1]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_oscillator_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_oscillator_model
- arcticbull 2y agoFrom the article, the dye is tartrazine -- FD&C Yellow 5 or E102.
- excalibur 2y agoOkay well getting yellow #5 on your skin definitely doesn't make you invisible. Source: Doritos
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoWell, there may be something to it - get enough Dorito dust on you and you'll be invisible to the opposite sex.
- pvaldes 2y agoNever tested on humans Some tropical American frogs evolved to do it naturally (fam Centrolenidae). Some fishes also can do it also in a few different orders (Siluriformes and Perciformes at least), so in lower vertebrates it is possible and evolved several times. But they have a different metabolism than ours and a mouse skin is much more thin than our own skin. I assume that this effect will work only on very small animals and the optical effect will hit some thickness limit somewhere. Could work on fingers but not in heart. At this moment my hype level is a 4 over 10.
- jldugger 2y ago> Never tested on humans But a few billion have ingested it in the past year, sometimes even in medical pill form to make yellow pills. Could be worse at higher doses but seems plausibly safe and worth further testing.
- karmajunkie 2y agoThe poison, as they say, is in the dose... just speculating but the quantity of dye ingested versus that used to render skin transparent may be such that the former is relatively innocuous while the latter would be very harmful. In particular it seems to be genotoxic at relatively low levels so that would be concerning for use in humans.
- pvaldes 2y agoI don't recall the case of anybody grabbing a doritos bag and seeing trough their fingers, but a lamp behind your hand definitely can turn your fingers translucent. Maybe with both effects combined? The more valuable contribution here is probably the idea IMHO. To know that the optical effects of the light can be manipulated with the correct stuff and we could search for it. An ointment seems of to be useful to a restricted volume, to maybe the first millimeters of the skin. We evolved totally transparent proteins that are hard, resilient and harmless. We have them in the eyes so we know how to do it. If we could only suggest the body to temporarily accumulate those proteins in the upper layers of the skin, or we could inject temporarily the proteins in local areas of interest that would be awesome (and maybe safe as long as is our own human protein)... On the skin the continuous shedding of the upper layers would probably self-fix the stuff.
- azinman2 2y agoTruly wild. This could be an amazing advancement if true and safe!
- Reason077 2y agoI imagine it could eventually lead to a full invisibility serum, as documented in the classic Kevin Bacon film Hollow Man. Of course, we need to be aware of the side effects (mostly murderous rampaging).
- spuriouserror31 2y ago> Of course, we need to be aware of the side effects (mostly murderous rampaging). Common side effects include rash, constipation, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, homicidal urges, drowsiness, insomnia, headache, and dry mouth.
- Unai 2y agoYou forgot blindness. If you're transparent, your eyes won't be able to refract light. Which is good if you also have homicidal urges, but awful if you get diarrhea.
- yencabulator 2y agoAnd would you get invisible diarrhea? (This might be the more desirable of the two outcomes. Otherwise you the man may be invisible, but everyone sees your intestinal contents floating in mid-air.)
- lazyasciiart 2y agoHow would it get into bones? Wouldn’t the likelier outcome be visible animated skeletons, rather than full invisibility?
- moralestapia 2y agoIt says it's never been tested on humans and the proper diligence should follow, But given that we already eat large amounts of it with no harmful side effects, the expectations are good.
- ryanwhitney 2y agoeh i just put some on the top of my hand and i didn't see any bones
- gus_massa 2y agoThe dose makes the poison. Considering that food usually don't make your tongue transparent [1], probably you need to use more than the usual amount to get the effect. [1] Note that they get skin that is transparent only to one shade of red, it's not transparent to all the visible spectrum.
- moralestapia 2y agoThe absorbed dose makes the poison. The effect of a substance is usually three orders of magnitude lower when you rub it on your skin vs. when you swallow it.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> effect of a substance is usually three orders of magnitude lower when you rub it on your skin vs. when you swallow it Going out on a limb and guessing you're at an effective dose for something when it's making your skin transparent.
- alwa 2y agoI’m surprised that this characteristic of an extremely common dye—being used in its main application, as a dye—hasn’t been described before. Surely there’s some limitation that’s obvious to those skilled in the chemical and biological arts? Or is it really just a matter of serendipity waiting til now to lead anybody down the path of trying it this way?
- RobotToaster 2y agoGiven how common it is, it does seem weird that nobody has spilled it on themselves and noticed this effect.
- rincebrain 2y agoThe article says it's only to the depth it penetrates, so given that you have a lot of skin, comparatively, I'd guess it'd be hard to distinguish from the dye staining you weirdly for a bit.
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoon this point curcumin aka tumeric has a quite a similar though not perfectly the same wavelength-adsorption profile (i.e. anything with a strong yellow color) tumeric / curcumin is often used a magic skin treatment type dealie. question is why are not all these wanting-to-have-youthful-skin type people discovering transparency! answer is below but TLDR human skin is thicker and doses are still low. some main points from the paper( damned paywell, see supplement) > the dye only goes about 1mm deep, so maybe that works magic in a mice but not so good in humans nor noticable. > the dye comes it at arnd 0.5-1 molar solution. gmw is 500 g/mol ish. so 1M solution is 500g in 1L or 0.5g in 1 mL aka 500 mg in 1 mL. Okay, fine, you prepare this and rub 500 mg on your big toe from a little 1 mL aliquot. the daily limit or whatever for the food dye is around 4 mg! Soooo... >on the latter point, safety, the supplement had a bunch of stuff where they were like "we did all the normal blood tests on the mice, and looked at the tissue, and looked to see if they died later, and it all looks good"
- rsynnott 2y ago
- ardrak 2y ago> At the moment, transparency is limited to the depth the dye penetrates, but Hong said microneedle patches or injections could deliver the dye more deeply. Reverse tattoos incoming.
- RobotToaster 2y agoIf it dissolves in DMSO, penetration should be vastly improved.
- trhway 2y agoIt is stated to be slightly solvable in DMSO, so that may be already enough. Anyway, i've got the impression - layman from reading some related articles - with DMSO the solubility isn't that important in the sense that DMSO seems to be temporarily increasing physical permeativity of the tissues - kind of creates micropores - so that even some not very soluble stuff can probably get through. I have a small bottle of DMSO at home, wonder if should buy some Doritos on the way home :)
- beeflet 2y agoWhat kind of application are you suggesting with DMSO? t. chem student
- kragen 2y agoprobably mixing dmso with tartrazine and rubbing it on thin skin. dmso is commonly used as an excipient to promote dermal penetration (of the stratum corneum) by drugs in topical preparations see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3460663/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3460663/
- FjordWarden 2y agoSorry for being nerd, but your internal organs are going to get UV damage.
- deleted 2y ago
- freen 2y agoAwesomest Halloween ever.
- amelius 2y ago"I can tell what you had for dinner"
- moribvndvs 2y agoIn Doritos? How are call of duty players not constantly transparent?
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoTheir skin is transparent but cheeto dust isn't
- sethammons 2y agoHeh, like the superhero that can only go invisible if nobody is looking
- justinclift 2y agoMaybe their stomachs have been transparent the entire time, and no-one's realised. ;)
- teeray 2y agoI’ve seen this movie. It doesn’t end well for Kevin Bacon.
- swayvil 2y agoHalloween costume!
- seydor 2y agointrospective people eat doritos
- aster0id 2y agoNew kink incoming
- evan_ 2y agoWhen my little brother was 3 or 4 he stepped on a nail in our yard, probably dropped during some recent construction. It went all the way through his poor little foot, straight through, out the top. I can see it, vividly, in my mind's eye. Mom scooped us up and rushed us, still barefoot, to the ER. I remember him being almost calm- not the way I would have reacted. They x-rayed his foot and soaked it in a tub of what I now know to be iodine to kill bacteria. I remember this clearly: it was the first time I'd ever seen an x-ray in real life, rather than just in alphabet books. Fortunately the nail totally missed anything important, so they just pulled it out and bandaged him up- no worse for the wear. He went on to be an honest-to-God track star so it obviously didn't have any lasting effect. Decades later we were talking about something and he said to me, "Why don't they use that x-ray water anymore?". I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked him to elaborate. The way he remembers the incident is that they put his foot into a bucket of amber liquid and, once submerged, his skin became transparent. He looked in and saw his own bones, blood vessels, and- in the middle of it all- the nail that was causing such a fuss. He described wiggling his toes, flexing his ankle, and seeing the bones and tendons move, directly, with his own eyes. His toddler brain, probably in shock, had combined the x-ray film and iodine bath. Over the years it had grown more detailed and reinforced. He described it with such clarity that I almost wondered if I hadn't been mistaken. He didn't believe me when I told him how I remember it. We called our mom who confirmed my version of events, plus did some googling, which finally convinced him. Anyway I just sent him this article. It's interesting that not only is the x-ray water he remembers theoretically possible, it would actually be amber.
- knodi123 2y agoThat's fascinating! I also have a vivid childhood memory that I can see, clear as day, despite knowing as an adult that it's impossible. It's really uncomfortable to combine the facts that a.) memory is unreliable, and b.) memory is what gives me my sense of self. (if you don't accept that second fact, that's fine, I'm not here to convince anyone or debate)
- nullorempty 2y agoWell, he actually might have been perceiving what otherwise we don't perceive.
- adamredwoods 2y agoI wonder if this would improve Digital Optical Spectroscopy for cancer detection and monitoring? Also related: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/eden-2 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/eden-2
- m3kw9 2y agoCan’t wait till it becomes a trend on instagram
- tiahura 2y agoDon’t mice have skulls?
- ranger_danger 2y agoAbsorbing anything that ends in -zine into the body does not sound safe.
- r2_pilot 2y agoI hope you don't have allergies then as you might otherwise be taking cetirizine already.
- ranger_danger 2y agono it gives me headaches anyway
- dagurp 2y agofrom Wikipedia: > Tartrazine is among six artificial colors for which the European Union requires products that contain them to be marked with the statement May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. > The FDA requires that the Precautions section of prescription drug labels include the warning statement, "This product contains FD&C Yellow No. 5 (tartrazine) which may cause allergic-type reactions (including bronchial asthma) in certain susceptible persons.
- starkparker 2y agoSome practical VFX artists are gonna go wild with this
- egypturnash 2y agoHuh, I never expected to find out that the Ghouls from Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books were actually plausible. (They were perfectly normal medieval fantasy humans, except for their flesh and organs being mostly transparent, so you just saw a pinkish skeleton with a faint shimmer around it.)
- rbanffy 2y agoThis solves my Halloween costume for this year.
- D-Coder 2y agoThe Washington Post's headline for this article is: Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice My first reaction was, what the heck have I been smoking?
- ImHereToVote 2y agoImagine this as face cream at a rave.
- kragen 2y agospecifically tartrazine in only the red part of the spectrum. can this be real?
- roshankhan28 2y agowhat are we trying to achieve with making skin transparent? I dont see a use case. anyone want to help me with it? please tell me more about it.
- in_a_hole 2y agoKnee hurts, doctor can have a look and literally see what's wrong.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BoatyPrint 2y agoDiagnosing some internal illnesses without xray or MRI.
- diogolsq 2y agoxray can only pick up information up to a level. an extra tool(window to our inner bits) without the necessity of making a biopsy is always welcome.
- Lio 2y agoI can think of a use case. The same one we have for modified transparent Zebra Fish in medical research. That is so that you can observe features such as the circulatory system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebrafish#Transparent_adult_bodies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebrafish#Transparent_adult_bo...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dpassens 2y agoIn addition to the medical usecases listed in the other comments, it's also just pretty cool.
- justinclift 2y agoWonder if this has potential for internal imaging too? For example, with an endoscope or other thing that checks internal passageways. Applying this stuff (or whatever is appropriate to the given organ) could potentially allow the optical visibility of more stuff.
- sans_souse 2y agoI just got my Doritos dry rub on, followed by a Sunny D Shower, and now nobody can see me.
- RandomCitizen12 2y agoDon't forget to go to Canada and get some Cheezies
- skibz 2y agoI'm quite interested in how the use of tartrazine has been regulated around the world. In my home country, for example, it's not permitted for use in food. Many other places, however, allow this.
- nottorp 2y agoInteresting, seems to be banned in at least 4 european countries (if i'm to trust a chatbot).
- alentred 2y agoIt is fun to imagine how my intestines become transparent every time I drink Fanta and there is no one to see it but the microbes living there. Who probably "freak out" in their own way.
- Intralexical 2y ago> The team then smeared the yellow dye on a mouse’s underbelly, making the abdominal skin see-through and revealing the rodent’s intestines and organs. > The procedure has not yet been tested on humans and researchers will need to show it is safe to use, particularly if the dye is injected beneath the skin. How did they resist the urge to sneak a peak at their own arm or one of their fingers?
- siva7 2y agoYou don't play with chemicals
- lazide 2y agoClearly you don’t know many chemists? You might as well tell EOD to not play with explosives!
- DocFeind 2y agoconfirmed as correct
- diggan 2y agoEven when the play is "touching" and the chemicals are "food dyes"? I wouldn't say I'm a risk taker, but even I would probably try that out for giggles.
- lm28469 2y agoThat's kind of how we got LSD, saccharin and microwave ovens. (not really "playing with" but not being super careful about safety)
- perlgeek 2y agoEven if not intentional, such things happen by accident. Have you ever read up on how the psychedelic properties of LSD were discovered? > While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small amount of the drug and discovered its powerful effects From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#Discovery
- smeej 2y agoI know they say "not tested in humans," but I don't think anybody's going to convince me nobody in the lab tried it out when they thought nobody was looking, unless there's some really obvious (to experts) reason to assume this won't work in humans.
- gus_massa 2y agoIt only makes the skin transparent for a particular red wavelength, not all light, the article is overselling it. Also, I guess you need a high concentration that is not so easy to remove as described in the article, and I'm worried that a be toxic in high doses.
- bookofjoe 2y agoI was about to submit this Guardian story before it appeared on HN but when I read it was in mice I desisted, since each time I've gone ahead with similar articles/papers, comments immediately came in that it was "in mice." For me here that mouse ship has sailed.
- pvaldes 2y ago<s>Hey Tiktokers, who needs a stupid dye? Show your inner light. Swallow our new gastrosubmarine led pill and shit bright like a diamond.<s/>
- dghughes 2y agoBasically reverse sunblock. Ouch! I wonder how light affects internal organs. Skin is meant to be a protective barrier.
- devilirium 2y agoI don't think it's particularly bad for them, especially in the short term. In my extended family it's common to use red light therapy, which penetrates into the tissues to help the fight against inflammations, infections. It's also used as a treatment for dry eyes, which I also have. I may be wrong though, maybe common sunlight is more harmful with a translucent skin? Idk, it's interesting though.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoDepends on the spectrum! Our insides don‘t care about visible light but long term sunny-day level UV light can not be good for them. This dye seems to be limited to red, visible spectrum, but you‘d need to test that first.
- jjkaczor 2y agoHalloween is about to become even more weird...
- kevindamm 2y agoHow long before someone tries to make a tattoo using this as ink?
- amelius 2y ago"I need to go to the bathroom." "Yes, I can see it."
- Perenti 2y agoIt would be a nice change to see people walking around with their organs out, rather than laying in the gutter or the bottle shop car-park.
- andai 2y agoI read a short story in my youth -- it must have been by Paul Jennings -- about a boy who got bit by a weird bug. His skin turned transparent and he had to go live in a cave. Many years go by and he gets bit again and his skin goes back to normal. He finally returns to society, only to find that everyone has gone transparent, and he is once again an outcast...
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(short_story_collection)#Clear_as_Mud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undone_(short_story_collection... https://littlelibraryofrescuedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/01/undone-by-paul-jennings.html https://littlelibraryofrescuedbooks.blogspot.com/2012/01/und... https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C823155 https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C823155
- albrewer 2y agoI read the same book / story! I have no idea where I read it or who it was by.
- billfor 2y agoSome countries have banned it in humans, due to health concerns. https://www.verywellhealth.com/tartrazine-free-diet-83227 https://www.verywellhealth.com/tartrazine-free-diet-83227
- wordsinaline 2y agoAnyone want to sell me some tartrazine?
- tampontim 2y ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago"Endure" holy shit. Imagine having this much to say about what other people do to their own bodies and being subjected to like... seeing it. For a few seconds. Sometimes. My sincerest condolences sir, it's a wonder you've survived such trials.
- bdcravens 2y agoStrange dating moment: "I really do have a good heart!" (takes off shirt, take out a bottle of dye, and smear it on torso) "See, just look at it!"
- bookofjoe 2y ago>Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm6869 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm6869