Doritos Makes Mice Transparent: The Surprising Science Behind This Discovery

Craig: scientists discover that the yellow orange powder in doritos can make mice transparent.

Jon: yeah. this is both cool and scary. so for those it's yellow five, which is tartazene, which is a common food dye. it's not just used in doritos. it's used in tons of other products, but it can render mouse skin pretty much completely transparent. so it's scary that it can do that, but it's also cool because it could revolutionize medical imaging, like like, veins, tapping and all that sort of stuff. right?

Craig: yeah. it's kinda cool be it's scary because let's face it. we've all had doritos. yeah. even if some of us are trying to lead a healthier life now and doritos aren't in our general diet, we've all had them before, and we've all had that orange dye. and, like, we're just finding out that this, tartrazine is doing this, yellow five. like, you know, how much of this other have we put in our body and how other ways has it affected us?

Jon: well, we're speaking of other things, weren't we weren't we consuming, the same ingredient that's put into yoga mats when we were eating subway for a while there?

Craig: is that what they found in the tuna?

Jon: no. no. no. that was the bread. oh, okay. the bread. yeah. but, anyways, back to this. it's cool, but so the way that it works is it changes the reflect refractive jesus. refractive index of water to match that of fat, which allows the light to pass through the tissue. that's how it works. so it was cool because they applied a mixture of water and tartrazine to mice, which made their skin, muscle, and connective tissues transparent within minutes. now those of you that are worried about this, the effect is reversible, and washing off the dye, restored the opacity, and the dye is exerted through the urine. so there's no trace left over afterwards. so there's nothing left in your bodies like other things.

Craig: and so this is a noninvasive and reversal approach that achieves tissue transparent transparency, allowing visibility of living organs in a healthy rodent with red dyes. note that the redness in the images comes from dyes, not blood, if you're looking at before and after. so it can now track dyes through your system. so that's in a mouse. imagine what they can do now if they can take this and apply this to humans, which they're starting to talk about so they can, track stuff and look at your blood clots or potentially organs or whatever through your skin and have a better idea of what's going on.

Jon: yeah. this is cool. but i know there's gonna be challenges because, obviously, human skin is, what, like, ten, twenty times thicker than mouse skin. so yeah. there's obviously gonna be the question is how much tartrazine is needed, and is it safe to use that much tartrazine to make the skin, transparent enough in humans. right?

Craig: yep. so as in optics, we spend a awful lot of time trying to increase how well we can see into tissue by twenty percent or fifty percent and say these guys come along and annihilate that boundary by a factor of ten. so, you know, this is yeah. amazing. it's not magic. it's not eliminate

Jon: mri not mris, but cat no. mris. yeah. mris that could eliminate a bunch of things where it's very expensive. this could make it, much more accessible as well if if they if they can derive a cheap, protocol. but, yeah, this is really, really cool.

Craig: you already talked about complete optical transparency in the red region, visible spectrum per, the study wash or die away, and the skin returns to neutral. sorry if the sound's turned up on this. i'll grab it.

Jon: no. it doesn't. oh, the sound. yeah. cool. yeah. yeah. so

Craig: you can see, oh,

Jon: that's crazy. that's super fast, but, yeah, i saw that. look at that. yeah. for those that are watching the line. yeah. yeah.

Craig: very cool.

Jon: let me see

Craig: if i can close that now. there we go. so the biological tissues like skin are usually not see through because light gets scattered as it passes through them. so based on these two types of compounds, refracted light at different angles, a light particle or photon traveling through tissue under normal sense circumstances moves from water particle to lipid particle being bounced away, taking a long winding path and often is being absorbed. so this changes that. the yeah. tartrazine dye through its powerful absorption of blue wavelengths of light changes the refractive index of water to be much closer of fat. so interesting.

Jon: that's really cool. yeah. the kramer's kronig principle. that's really, that's really awesome. yeah. the question is, though, is although while it's doing this and while you're applying it to your skin, i know it's changing the refractive index. right? but is it doing any other damage? i think they're gonna have to do a lot of research on that.

Craig: yeah. agreed. and i think this is interesting. i love where they're going with this. we've got a nice article over on, toronto starts dot com talking about, doritos makes mike's transparency. they're talking about the science behind it and going into it. but i'm talking about great. we're looking at the biological impacts. that's the natural stuff. right? we're talking about such as detecting cancerous tumors, photothermal cancerous treatments, laser tattoo removal. there's a bunch of stuff here. imagine being able to view the entire mouse's brain in exquisite detail. now if you could now modify you could actually look inside the human brain much easier, like you say, with mri and stuff. it might be able to, target things so much easier and better. imagine a surgeon being he's trying to take whatever thing on the edge of your brain out and now being able to actually see it as he goes in. you're not guessing.

Jon: elon musk will probably love this.

Craig: oh, absolutely. this would be great for neuralink. but i turn around and say, alright. this is really cool concept. now are they gonna apply this to different technologies? saying, alright. now that we got an idea that different chemicals, different colors interact different ways that allow us to see different, light to pass through things differently, are we gonna be able to take that to an extreme level and, i don't know, use it as x-ray technology, use it as, not just on humans. i'm talking about looking through buildings, looking into the ground, looking into

Jon: i don't know because it work yeah. that's a good question. i don't know if it would work on that.

Craig: i assume not just the way it does it, but i just start thinking about, alright. you could do certain things, putting chemicals on metal or whatever that'll do something similar that allow this to happen. so i'm just curious as to where this might go outside of the medical field.

Jon: yeah. that would be interesting. right now, currently, i know it's found in household products like detergents and other cleaning products. it's used in food for cats, dogs, fish, birds, and small rodents. it's used in cosmetics right now. but as far as this, like, being spread on the surface to use, yeah, i don't know what the limitations are. i didn't do a deep dive into that, whatever principle. i can't remember what it was called. but i'll have to do a deeper geek dive into it.

Craig: definitely. it's the kramer's kronig, relations principle. right?

Jon: yeah. kramer's kronig. yeah.

Craig: and, you know, it just makes you think because, you know, red dye gets a lot of attention just because it affects the body and people know that. now we got the yellow dye. like, we really have no idea what these dyes are doing to us internally.

Jon: no. and now they find that one of the dyes is making, making ourselves transparent. so

Craig: yeah. it's crazy. like, when you think about they're just discovering this now, how long have we been using this dye? yeah. any last thoughts on this?

Jon: no. but just quickly, the kramers kroning relations, they're mathematical formulas that connect the real and imaginary parts of complex functions that are analytic in the upper half plane. so in the context of optics and material science, they relate the real and imaginary parts of optical response functions like dielectric susceptibility or refractive index. so that's where they came up with that. so

Craig: so if i was in the chat when chat right now, i would ask how many doritos did the mouse have to eat to be make his skin transparent?