This is wild. Scientists just used yellow five dye to make skin transparent enough to see living organs underneath. That's the same dye that gives foods like Mountain Dews, Skittles, and Doritos, their classic radioact... I mean, delicious look. This is just a simulation. They haven't done it in humans yet. But this is a picture of a living mouse where you can see its liver, intestines, and bladder. Invisible light. All it took was rubbing a ton of yellow dye into its belly and then shining a bright red light. Here's how it works. The reason is The reason you normally can't see through skin is because all the different cells and fluids in our body cause light to bend when it hits them, which us nerds call refraction. When I shine this laser through water at an angle, you can see how that angle changes. But at least the water is uniform, so it's a single change at both ends. Add multiple water beakers and it starts changing even more. But something like milk has different fats and proteins that refract all in different ways, and soon the light gets completely lost, which is called scattering. Which makes things opaque. Now, Stanford researchers discovered that if they rubbed a whole bunch of yellow fives, onto organic tissue, flesh, it changes how it interacts with the light. It makes it absorb all of those blue wavelengths, but it lets red light pass right through and changes the refractive index of all those fats and fluids in our body to be more uniform. More like water, less like milk. They used it on a mouse's skull, and it let them look at its brain. It's still a ways away from human use given the amount of dye required, but this, or an even safer chemical with a similar effect, could eventually lead us to do things like diagnosed tumors without any invasive surgery. I'll keep you updated.
Additional notes
Do NOT try this at home!!!! 📚 Study: "Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules" - DOI: 10.1126/science.adm6869 #science #stem #sciencenews #breakthrough #edutok Video credit: NSF
References
- Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules. DOI: 10.1126/science.adm6869. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adm6869
- Video credit listed in caption: NSF.