Slashdot Mirror
The Invisible Man? Kinda.
A lot of people have written in regarding the announcement from scientists at the University of Texas @ Austin discovering "invisibilty". Well, sort of. What it does do is make small areas of skin (humans have not been tested) transparent for a short amount of time. By transparent, I mean 2 mm of transparency - not exactly enough to make me Inside Out Boy. Yet.
"Oh darling you have such lovely kidneys"
"Whoa".
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
"Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"
when I went to UT Austin I felt pretty damn invisible, I thought it was just in the water there ... ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
By transparent, I mean 10 mm of transparency - not exactly enough to make me Inside Out Boy. Yet.
10 mm = 1 cm. That's enough to see blood vessels, bones (in many places), and all sorts of other fun stuff that lies beneath the skin. You won't be IOB yet, but you'll have a fun time grossing other people out.
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Put an LCD under the transparent skin in your hand. Put a Linux system in your stomach. Now you're a walking open-source machine!
Visit the
UT's been working on this technology for years to enhance the performance of the UT football team so we can rule college football even more than we already do. (everything at UT revolves around football, naturally)
It's being secretly tested on pigskin, as well.
Hook 'em.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
if you could somehow do it to order.
Mugger jumps out and demands money, you say something scary in Latin, then say "Your soul is mine mortal", add a cackly laugh, give your self a quick injection and your skin turns transparent.
You wouldn't get the aformentioned mugger out of a church with crowbars.
Bob.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
see ya!
Who wants to see PICTURES and not just a couple, of this in ACTION?
This sounds neat as hell but without pictures it just lacks something.
--- www.f-theocean.com
This would be a great gag to put in a suntan lotion tube.
"Hey, Jenny McCarthy, I see you like the model B45XL, also."
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Thus far, the transparency extends only a couple of millimeters deep, but that's at least five times and as much as 20 times deeper into the body than doctors can currently see with optical devices such as lasers. Doctors can now see only about a tenth of a millimeter deep with light.
I know this has been discussed many times before, but do they even read the articles they post? It's just a couple millimeters, not 10. Where the hell did 10 millimeters come from anyways? Slashdot has been pretty bad on getting the facts right recently. I expect better that this.
Tatoo Removal
20 years from, all these inked Gen Y'ers are going to pay big bucks to make their tattos go away, and these guys are going to rake it in 8)
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
So now all we have to do is find a way to make bones tranparent and all the internal organs transparent and then we'll be able to make people invisible ;)
Ahh well we can only imagine!
this is first going to be used by the adult entertainment industry.
Remember the first DVDs you saw on display at your local computer show? I'd bet that they were all pornos.
This is going to be used to make a new level of disgustingly graphic porno.
"New from 'Wet Spot' entertainment a new exclusive, 'Inside Ron Jeremy's ballsack", it's sure to educate while it entertains"
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
...as it certainly must, because it doesn't sound as if it requires much in the way of expensive equipment or specialized expertise, then I can see some interesting developments:
Just a couple of thoughts.
-TBHiX-
"Well, Bob. It looks like we won't need to make your skin invisible to check in on that tumor anymore. The patch above the area in question appears to have fallen off this morning."
Sandidge
There is a product that does about the same thing that has been around for a long time. Actually after you apply it to something, the longer you leave it on the more invisible the object gets. I don't know the trade name for it, but the scientific name is H2SO4.
Thank god for this. With transparent skin I will no longer need to perform surgery upon myself with my kitchen knives to locate and extract the implants and baby aliens implanted in me on my last abduction to the mothership. If this advances to transparency of bone structure, then even exploratory work in my head with a drill may become unecessary!
Perhaps the aliens will no longer resort to anal probes quite so often now that they can see what they need from the outside. You would not even want to see one of their "medical devices". Ouch, and I mean OUCH! Sometimes I think there might be something wrong with those aliens IN THE HEAD!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Cryonic suspension includes reducing freezing damage by injecting large amounts of ice-crystal inhibiting chemicals. (Think "antifreeze".) Glycerol is one that is popular.
But explicit cryonic research tends to be done on a shoestring - because it isn't all that popular, and many of the suspendees need to put the resources they allocated for it into funding the suspension.
So (like most technologies) cryonics tries to get as much of a boost as it can from research done for other purposes.
This skin-transparency research has obvious medical applications, and the researchers are already talking about testing the toxicity of glycerol. This will no doubt lead to a lot of research into that, and a search for other, less toxic, chemicals that can infiltrate cells and smooth the refractive index to increase transparency.
Some of these are likely to be good candidates for cryonic preservatve agents, and thus this research should lead lower-damage preservatives, both for tissue banks and for the cryonic life-extension movement.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At first, I said, "Whoa!" in my best Keanu Reeves voice. After reading the article, it seemed like a rather simple technique.
I think they are just doing index matching. Glycerol has an index of refraction close to that of water. Since cells are mostly water, filling all the inter-celluar areas with something of similar index will allow rudimentary index matching to be accomplished. With the index of refraction much closer throughout the volume, scattering will be much reduced, allowing better light propagation, and consequently, better imaging results.
This process is commonly used to test moderately polished glass optics, by immersing them in an oil of equivalent index. Since it's usually bad form to inject living things with mineral oils, a different substance was needed: hence glycerol.
To observe the effect:
- Take a clear piece of hard plastic
- Rough one or both surfaces (sandpaper is good)
- It should now be translucent or even opaque depending on how much you damaged the surface.
- Immerse in water. You should be able to see through it much better.
Anyhow - that's my guess on the basics of this technique.
-----
http://movies.shoutingman.com
ShoutingMan.com
I mean X-ray's of course. This sounds like a good way for surgens to operate on area's with less need of X-rays first which could give the doc's just enough extra time to save a life or two. Could also be good for other medical inspections, rather then take a biopsy of you stomache, lets inject it with this and peer right into it and have a look-see. "ahh, had the tuna plate huh"
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Wake me up when they invent prismic sheilding.
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
If you are transparent, light passes through you with no effect. If you are invisible people just can't see you. All transparent people are invisible, but not all invisible people are transparent. For instance, if I don my camo-wear and hid under some leaves I'm (theoretically) invisible. But I'm not transparent.
How does this apply in this case? One example: Make my entire body except my retinas transparent. Who's going to notice a couple of dime-sized disks floating in the air, especially if the background is patterned?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
If I remember correctly, the military is working with a technology known as Active Caomouflage. This system would allow a soldier's uniform or a tactical vehicle's camouflage netting to analyze the light signatures of the surrounding terrain and mimic these signatures thus integrating the soldier or vehicle into the surrounding area. There is an army Submission of Proposal for this technology. Read about it here. From what I understand, the candidate would wear a special suit lined with fiber optic cabling which would dynamically integrage the wearer into his surroundings. There was also a special on the Discovery Channel last year about this technology but I can find no reference to the programme on their website.
K
We are more than 6 degrees away from Kevin Bacon.
Centigrade or Fahrenheit?
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let's take a look at that mole, shall we?
Oh, wait, that's a baby alien... cool.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Actually, your comparison is more apt than you might think.
Few people know this, but the Crusades were actually tested on animals before being used on people. There test runs involved waging war against an army of mice holed-up in a mouse-size walled city. They found they could defeat the mice (tied to full-size sabres, for the sake of realism) with minimal fatalities, and thus gave the go-ahead for the move to the real Crusades. Though the actual war-waging didn't go as easily as it had in the tests, they found that the "rape and pillage" portion of the Crusade worked much better than it had with the mice.
The enemies of Democracy are
... by the administration here to eliminate overcrowding. If you can't see students, you don't have to worry about them. I hear they're going to build invisible dorms. We already have invisible parking lots.
Shhh, don't tell anyone.
The researchers later announced that their invisibility system causes tv execs to go insane and produce crappy IM sequels
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Your epidermis is showing!"
"No it's not!!!"
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is translucency, not invisibility. It might win the high school science fair, but it's not worthy of an announcement on Slashdot, IMO. I wonder if this is just spoofing the press.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
a few thousand years from now. It's called an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem). Every BistroMatic has one.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Why don't they make clothing out of fiber-optic cables? The cables would run around the body with small signal loss. Light would go in one side and out the other, making the wearer fairly transparent. I've heard this from other sources, I can't say I thought it up.
I'd rather be able to take a shirt off than be stuck with transparent skin.
"Uhh...so is this going to wear off?"
What other usages (apart from being able to see what you had for dinner) are there?
Use it on a pregnant woman, and you wouldn't need ultrasound to watch the fetus, who would have the side benefit of getting a womb with a view.
I've been wondering about other potential agents could be used instead of or together with glycerol to possibly improve the effect. DMSO is one possibility. Nontoxic, diffuses through tissues easily, and has an index of refraction of 1.477. Biologically inert sugars such as trehalose might also be added to the mix.
BTW, all of these agents also happen to be cryoprotectants.
Are you thinking ot Ethelyne Glycol?
Nope. That's for cars, and it's neurotoxic. Preserving the brain is the most important part of Cryonic suspension. Indeed, most suspendees are head-only, hoping for a replacement body or a fully-regrown body with brain downloaded with data extracted from the old brain.
Glycerol is one of the chemicals that has been used for tissue. (I don't know if it's part of the current protocol, or of the one that they've used to freeze rat hearts to liquid nitrogen temperatures and get them to beat when rewarmed.)
See the back issues of Cryonics magazine to track the technology.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
we'll all be one degree closer to Kevin Bacon?
"It's all right, it's ok. There's something to live for" - Uncle Bill
I once had a girl-friend like that. Her skin was so white she looked like one of those plastic, transparent, circulatory system lab models. I personally know several nerds who, after spending this last winter transfixed before their active screens, looked like the limp milky fish you see laying on the ice in your local market. Their skin looked more like wet roadmap than real flesh, their arteries like interstate highways. Just one question: does this mean that you could get a sun-tan from the inside out?
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
It's not a big deal, but it might be a way to make some dermatology treatments, like laser hair removal, work on more people. Laser hair removal requires that the skin be much lighter than the hair, so it doesn't work on fair-skinned blondes or dark-skinned people. This might help.
I really hate getting this deep into an OT discussion, BUT...
The things you bring up are nice, cute and whatnot. However, the University of Tennessee began in 1794. When was that college in Austin formed? If it was before UT then it would be UMexico, wouldn't it?
Why must UM insist on using orange and white? Those are the UT Knoxville colors, that were around ages before Texas was emancipated from Mexico, with the strong assistance from some prominant Tennesseans.
There is no denying that the University of Mexico, Austin has had some stellar academic achievements, but the initials UT were in use about a century before your 2nd largest state in the union was even thought of.
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL