Things That Caught My Eye #7
Making mice transparent, alphabets, and dealing with school
This week in Things That Caught My Eye:
Scientists are thrilled to discover that Doritos dye makes mice transparent! What could go wrong?
Language evolved a long time ago; at least tens of thousands of years later we invented writing. Then the alphabet. But it took a long time after alphabets existed before alphabetical order occurred to anyone, and an even longer time before it took hold.
How girls and boys respond differently to bad teaching. Related: School marms, Gwen Walz, and what women apparently don’t get about men.
Orange Food and Transparent Mice
There is a common food dye—known poetically as FD&C yellow 5, also as tartrazine—which is largely responsible for the orange color of Doritos.
There is also a desire, among researchers of a certain stripe, to observe the insides of research animals while they’re still alive. It’s less destructive that way, and certain scientific questions can’t be asked of dead animals, only of live ones. Trouble is, skin is opaque. (Although there are some neotropical frogs, known as glass frogs, for whom this is not the case. You can see right through their skin, into their organs.)
So a research team set about trying to figure out whether there might be a molecule that would alter how the tissues of animals—specifically of mice—interact with light. FD&C yellow 5—aka tartrazine—emerged as a likely candidate. Sure, it turns Doritos orange, but it turns lipid-and-fluid-rich-tissues transparent.
Paint it on mice, and their skin disappears. Wash them off, and their skin becomes opaque once again. What could go wrong?
In fact, this seems like a kind of ingenious if creepy revelation, but I was struck by the following line in Nature’s reporting on the research (which was published in Science).
“because tartrazine is a food dye, it is safe to use on living mice”