Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent Scientists have discovered a common food colorant has a remarkable property - making the skin of live mice transparent, so the organs beneath become visible. The dye – tartrazine, aka E102 – is a mostly-harmless dye used to make food yellow. In a paper published in the journal Science last week, scientists describe how the dye …
It's known to cause significant behavioural issues in children, and large consumption has been linked with heart attacks in healthy adults (eg after drinking a few litres of dilute or soda on a hot day).
Several countries have banned its use in drinks and sweets aimed at children due to the above effects. A few places (eg Austria, Germany & Norway) have banned it from food entirely.
I hope they can find an alternative dye, as the effect requires quite a significant exposure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine
Don't know how trustworthy this is but the wikipedia article says that tartrazine causes allergic symptoms in about 1:10000 people but the other 'well known' issues are all just urban legends. It might be a case of scared because they 'read it on the internet' so it becomes true by repetition.
Icon - well he might be drinking soda.
The behavioural issues have better evidence than many pharmaceuticals, so proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Last time I looked up the literature (about ten years?), the heart attacks were strongly correlated, but no direct causal link had been found. So those could indeed be something else entirely.
Allergies are a separate matter, people can be allergic to pretty much anything.
Would be nice if there were actual shots of the transparent skin in the video, rather than an animation. The actual images shown on other articles makes it clear that it's just kind of transparent, dark, not at all clear (like seeing something out of focus), and requires a special laser imaging technique rather than just being able to look at it even with a microscope, so it's not going to really make it possible to just look to make diagnoses or anything, but of course it's just a first version.
What would happen if either there is contamination to the "orange stuff" that Trump puts on his skin, or, mistakenly or even deliberately uses Tartrazine instead?
Good thing that invisibility is not total as in the Invisible Man, else just think of the mischief he will get up to
The stuff needs a major warning label stamped on it: NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CASUAL WEEKEND USAGE!
It's in SunnyD, yellow M&M, and Doritos, and makes Mountain Dew shrink a penis. As the boffins explain: "The dye [is] excreted through urine" making the penis temporarily invisible. They helpfully add: "As soon as we rinsed and massaged [it] the effect was reversed within minutes". Minutes after your date is irreversibly gone that is ...
Dozens of Invisible Teenage Males Admitted to Hospitals
UC Berkley medical staff called for ambulance buses to tranport dozens of male teenaged first year students to hospitals suffering from a variety of heart problems and a lengthy variety of physical injuries after the male first year chemistry students injected themselves with tartrazine believing it made them invisible, so that they could invade the female dorms and steal the most panties. Unfortunately the female boxing teams were holding a training session in the lobby.
<I'm sorry about the keyboards, but I honestly expect this fallout. Soon. The Stupidification has begun>
One wonders if young women slathering this stuff on their breasts to reveal all the ductwork, blood vessels, and everything else that REALLY lurks under the sweater would cure silly young men of their curiosity once and for all. Or at least make that creepy co-worker go away.
I'm sort of amazed this has never been seen before.
Actually it sort of has. The Fins have made transparent wood (sort of). Opening the potential for the worlds first all wood double glazing.
But with the idea out there (right colour + right choice of substrate) what other stuff could be made "inspectable" without an X-ray/MI/THz sensor?
Potentially this is a huge gateway opening to all sorts of stuff.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
