> 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?
It's a food dye, if you can eat it you certainly can put it on your skin. And they probably did but don't want to announce that they experimented on themselves.
> if you can eat it you certainly can put it on your skin
That doesn’t always follow. There are (organic, large-molecule) substances that your mucus membranes will protect you from, and which you’ll then digest (denature) and greatly metabolize (non-leaky intestinal absorption routes through the liver) and so render harmless; but which would greatly harm you if left on your skin, as the substance can potentially absorb from there all the way to your bloodstream, without any digestion or a chance at first-pass metabolism.
Think, for example: testosterone gel. Eating it wouldn’t result in much if any testosterone entering your bloodstream — but rubbing it on yourself sure does.
Yep, which is one of the reasons why this discovery is so weird.
The reason I mention cosmetics, is it means that it's at least in theory skin-safe for humans up to at least some threshold. The next questions would be: what's the threshold at which it's not skin-safe for us anymore, and is that high enough for this effect to happen? Neither are foregone conclusions though.
That isn't remotely what I was saying. You can die from drinking too much water, that doesn't mean you should avoid drinking water for fear of what it's doing to your insides.
Why is the effect concerning? If you pour water on undyed cloth, it has the same effect and makes the cloth much more transparent, but that doesn't mean that the water is damaging to the cloth.
Also basic human biology: just because something's safe to consume (which keeps it isolated from the rest of your body until it's been through the digestive tract) in extremely low doses doesn't mean it's safe to expose yourself to a highly concentrated dose via external exposure.
That's not a safe assumption. There have been cases where food flavourings have been tried in e-cigarette liquids and caused irritation in the users' airways.
To be clear, there are no documented cases of bronchiolitis obliterans caused by vaping. Historically, there were cases among workers in a microwave popcorn factory who were exposed to large quantities of the flavoring chemical diacetyl. Some early e-liquid flavors contained diacetyl, and while the level of exposure was drastically lower than that of a popcorn factory worker, people were concerned about it, and that concern led e-liquid manufacturers to stop using it.
Welcome to the Habanero’s Ulcer, a state-of-the-art aesthetics clinic that rubs patients vigorously with the world’s spiciest peppers, until they say the safe word, or we can see right through them!
Even 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.
> 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?