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Science

The Invisible Man? Kinda. 183

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.
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The Invisible Man? Kinda.

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  • Is this going to lead to more advanced cosmetic surgery?

    "Oh darling you have such lovely kidneys"

  • by SpyceQube ( 224045 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:32AM (#833141)
    This just made my Slim Goodbody suit totally obsolete.

  • when I went to UT Austin I felt pretty damn invisible, I thought it was just in the water there ... ;)

    timothy
  • 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.

    =================================
  • 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!
  • Okay, let's just forget about the ability to stand invisable next to a naked hot-grit covered Natalie Portman and think what other usages this technology has.
    Yeah, there's the medical one (which is covered in the article) allowing doctors to see 'below the skin', but there is also the possible military usage. Perfect it to get somebody totally invisable and you've got a damn good killing machine... What other usages (apart from being able to see what you had for dinner) are there?

    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • by griffjon ( 14945 ) <GriffJonNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:36AM (#833146) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • by bob_jordan ( 39836 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:36AM (#833147)
    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.
  • Other usages? How about a Halloween "costume?"

  • by tylerh ( 137246 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:39AM (#833149)
    This seems to be of limited use.
    Thus far, the transparency extends only a couple of millimeters deep...transparent human skin would allow optical devices to penetrate further and illuminate tissue properties... "It's really a simple idea," said Welch. "To make it useful will be the more difficult task."
    So, if want you want to see is in first 3 millimeters of skin, this might help. But it seems a really invasive procedure (saturating with Glycerol) for such a small benefit.
  • same reason you can't build a camera out of glass

    see ya!

  • by Grimster ( 127581 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:40AM (#833151) Homepage
    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.
  • 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 [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • I knew it was only a matter of time before scientific research yielded the answer...

    We are more than 6 degrees away from Kevin Bacon.

  • until it lets me look at naked women in the shower. :-)
    --------------------------
  • I bet drug users would love to get their hands on this. Sounds kinda sick, but it would make it a lot easier to find that vein. Kinda the darker side of the new technology.

    Even the samurai
    have teddy bears,
    and even the teddy bears

  • We might be tricked once, but this time we all know that this just another lie! Most likely just some over-zealous PR guy at the university hyped up the release. Two weeks from now Slashback will report that Professor Welch was actually performing experiments with sunless tanning products on rat skin.
    --
  • Of course such serums exists! And they are at a much more advanced state than that! I saw it in a documentary called Hollow Man or something like that... seems like it also makes you undestructible even if you get burned, electrocuted, hammered with a crowbar and lots of other things!
  • 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.
  • by tylerh ( 137246 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:43AM (#833159)
    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)
  • 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!

  • by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:46AM (#833161) Homepage Journal
    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
  • by TBHiX ( 26224 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:47AM (#833162) Homepage

    ...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:

    • Can you imagine what the body-art and tattoo people would be able to do with this stuff? Particularly in light of the fact that it is non-permanent? Raves featuring people displaying "invisible motifs" suddenly come to mind. Or how about a "floating tattoo", regular ink on invisible skin?
    • Akin to the above, how about courier intelligence? A message could be tattooed in flesh tones on someone. It's entirely undetectable under normal circumstances, but fade the flesh and... (does this sort of low-tech communication still have a place in today's espionage?)

    Just a couple of thoughts.

    -TBHiX-

  • One really had to wonder what fun side effects we'll find with this.

    "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

  • $ cat glycerol > /dev/mouse

    So that's what Joanie's been crying about all morning, chasing her tail, trying to get into the cupboards....

    b&

  • ...of all the fun you can now have at Halloween. You can go as the faceless man and gross out your neighbors.

    It could revolutionize the movie making industry as well. Think of the money they can save on expensive makeup for some characters as well as some of those CGI effects like you see in Hollowman....

  • by Riplakish ( 213391 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:53AM (#833166)
    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 [everything2.com].

  • Or at least, we'll be able to see what they had for lunch. ;)
    -J
  • by konstant ( 63560 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:55AM (#833168)
    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!
  • I think it's more likely to help you look through naked women, which is not so very useful.

  • by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:55AM (#833170) Journal
    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.

  • by skoda ( 211470 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:56AM (#833171) Homepage
    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
  • by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @06:56AM (#833172) Homepage
    Apple is suing for this transparent design, they claim it infinriges on there iMac model.
  • You know you're a geek when you read this story and the first thing that pops into your head is "Unreal Tournament Football? Where can I get the mod for that?"

    OK, I'll crawl back into my little hole now.
  • Paying an actor is more expensive than CG most of the time. Let's see. $20 million for Kevin Bacon, or $500,000 for a CG image. More importantly, how much do you think you'd have to pay an actor to be constantly injected with glycerol?
    Though, it doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun.
    - W
  • How about letting us folks moderate dumb articles off the front of the site?

    I vote this one "overrated", "offtopic", and "stupid."

  • 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"

  • So now I can go out without even my birthday suit showing?

    This will bring a whole new realm of weirdness to your average nudist colony.
  • You were blown out by NU and Arkansas, geez, -27 yards of rushing ring a bell?? UT did'nt score and offensive touch down in the last 10 quarters of thier season!!!! You guys don't even rule arkansas, let alone college football .......ROFLMAO...........
  • ...to the phrse "clear skin" (that's funny! gimme 2 points!!)
  • Well, if they can make skin invisible to a depth of 10mm, that would really make laser hair removal a viable thing :) and I'd think that a tattoo, "floating" in the air, would be cool :)

    But then, if they did this to the eyelids, say, in some nasty furrin country's jail, it'd play merry hell with getting to sleep ...
  • "look at those breasts! they're so....clear...."
    --------------------------
  • by Anonymous Coward
    What it does do is make small areas of skin (humans have not been tested) transparent for a short amount of time.

    What we really need is a substance that can make 10mm of clothing invisible for short periods of time.

  • Wake me up when they invent prismic sheilding.
    ----
    Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
  • by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:03AM (#833184)
    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?
    --
  • Never-the-less, a few millimeters is enough to make a large difference. And there are some fun applications. A beneath-skin watch (presuming you could keep the skin above the watch alive.) A flexible, forearm LCD panel. All sorts of things. That is, of course, provided that your body doesn't instantly reject anything you put in it. But it brings some of those nifty devices from Cyberpunk and Neuromancer a little closer.
    - W
  • Your point is on target, (one of my minor nitpicks with Hollow Man), but to be an annoying scientist, I'll suggest there's no fundamental reason you couldn't build a camera out of glass.

    You just need to make sure that you use the right combination of glass materials so that the film is not exposed until photo time, and that the lens performs adequately. (to help out your design - look to catadioptric lenses: they are solid glass lenses).

    Of course, now, the camera is probably no longer transparent :). So which is better, an invisible blind with a visible camera, or a visible man with a non-functional invisible camera?
    -----
    http://movies.shoutingman.com
  • uhh... a killing machine? well, if you want to be invisible, having a knife/gun/whatever else weapon is sorta hard, right? though it might scare the hell outta everyone... "look, a floating gun! aaahhhhh!"... ermm... whatever.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Gee.. now UT might actually have a chance against A&M! hehehe.. Gig 'Em! WHOOP!
  • "but there is also the possible military usage"

    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 [osd.mil]. 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.

  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:08AM (#833191) Homepage Journal
    We are more than 6 degrees away from Kevin Bacon.

    Centigrade or Fahrenheit?


    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • If it's not biological, your body won't reject it.
  • Jelly man!

    Ewwww....
  • Who knows, but if it could be adapted for other organs as well, and included in some sort of gene therapy regimen, perhaps complete invisibility isn't an impossibility. Course, it's probably going to be permanent that way.
  • by scott@b ( 124781 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:12AM (#833195)
    Glycerol's refractive index is 1.47 or so, plain water or even salt water is 1.3X - however all the organics making up celluar material are higher. Glycerol has been used for a long time for tissue preparation for microscope viewing, making the tissue more transparent.

    Note that glycerol (glycerin) is relatively non-toxic (it's been used in food for decades) and fairly quickly metabolised by the body (the effect is short-lived, provided you're alive).

  • ... I felt pretty damn invisible ...

    Actually, you were. But only to the really cute girls who wouldn't have gone out with you anyway.

    This will be easily remedied when you go IPO.
  • Most people can't!

    Damn you Slashdot! Damn you Slashdot!
  • Wrong. If you're wearing camo you look like a leaf. Distinguishing between two objects is different then then being invisible.

    EHA

  • One way to be invisible without being blind (or even transparent) would be to have cameras all over you and flexible LCD screens as well. Then transmit what each camera sees to the opposite screen. It would have to track the person to whom you want to appear invisible so as to render the world properly on your body, but within the usual limits (limited fidelity of LCD screens, time lag, etc.) you would seem invisible. And as long as the LCD screens covering your eyes had some transparency to them, you could see out. Eating might be harder.
  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:17AM (#833200) Homepage Journal
    Let's take a look at that mole, shall we?

    Oh, wait, that's a baby alien... cool.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • 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.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Usually this works pretty well for me, even without the transparency.
  • Are you thinking ot Ethelyne Glycol?
  • by mustermark ( 104271 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:20AM (#833204)
    ... 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.
  • You mean you've never played that game? .. and I think he means it in reference to Hollowman ...
    --
  • It took 44 other replies along the lines of "I can't wait to be invisible" before you posted the logical, scientific analysis of what they are doing. Moderators, do your duty.

    I had a similar thought when I saw this. They've been experimenting with glycerol and some additives to get the refractive index to match the intercellular R.I. Then they can see subcutaneous features with a non-invasive look. Just another tool in the doctors kit.

    the AC
  • Yeah but the thought of seeing a half digested McDonald's is enough to make anyone feel sick ;)
  • If we're going to talk about ultra-sci-fi here, why not just make retinas that are transparent to visible light and see using ultraviolet light?
  • work on a spray that makes clothing invisible? I don't want to have to go and work at the airport or walk around with a special video camera in order to be able to see people naked.
  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:31AM (#833210) Homepage Journal

    Can you imagine what the body-art and tattoo people would be able to do with this stuff? Particularly in light of the fact that it is non-permanent? Raves featuring people displaying "invisible motifs" suddenly come to mind. Or how about a "floating tattoo", regular ink on invisible skin?

    Because it'd probably be reckless without adequate testing
    Because it'd be likely to cause all kinds of nasty infections
    Because it could possibly result in sunburn in usual internal locations
    Mostly for all of these reasons and more it's gonna be a hit and everyone will be doing it!

    Our skin is actually a big bag that God gave us to keep all of our stuff in.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000

  • The researchers later announced that their invisibility system causes tv execs to go insane and produce crappy IM sequels
  • Okay, admit it, I'm betting that a lot of people (most non-Texans I'm sure) read "UT Scientists" and thought to themselves "Unreal Tournament has scientists? This game RULES!" ...okay, i'm an idiot, go raiders...
  • Oh yes, you must be refering to the historical documents about the hollow man project of the early twenty first century. I wonder if these scientists have even looked at their research, I'm sure it could definatly help them out.
  • Is this what kids are going to be doing in 10 years instead of tattoos and peircings ?
  • I've always thought that either bio-reactive or ust UV-reactive tats (to borrow from Sterling) would be neat. Esp bio-reactive. I'd love to have some horns that only became visible when I was pissed off.
  • Then install an LED emitter detector pair on opposite sides of your dick coupled to a CO2 canister on a small sized deflated doughnut shaped baloon. Bang away! Then when the cum interrupts the LED beam, the CO2 canister rapidly inflites the baloon and quickly forces you to "pull out" by blasting you off your partner!
    • (does this sort of low-tech communication still have a place in today's espionage?)

    IANASA, but there's an infinite number of covert channels [robertgraham.com] available via the internet that would allow for instant communication that's almost undetectable, so I don't know why they wouldn't use something in meatspace that's slow and more detectable.

  • by KFury ( 19522 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @07:37AM (#833221) Homepage
    "Your epidermis is showing!"

    "No it's not!!!"

    Kevin Fox
  • From the report, this appears to be high school science fair quality work. They inject a hygroscopic chemical to pull the water out of tissues so that it won't bend light as much. They haven't investigated the toxicity! But it follows that pulling the water out of tissues would damage them. People don't run on anti-freeze.

    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

  • So who's gonna notice a couple of detached, floating eyeballs moving around?

    Veteran Quake players, of course.

  • Or, perhaps more mainstream...


    Set up an email account in norway that forwards everything to Russia. Send encrypted emails to the bouncer.


    Or hide a message in some cutesy pictures and send them with a message that says "Here's some pictures from my trip, I'm having so much fun, I miss you".


    Or send some perl code that, when run with the "I'm a silly goose" piped to STDIN, prints out the message via some many weird calls between subroutines. The email it's attached to says "Here's the code update you asked for. Sorry it took so long, Vlachko's module had some weirdness in it."


    Disclaimer: I realize that not all spies are Russian.

  • a few thousand years from now. It's called an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem). Every BistroMatic has one.

  • 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?"

  • 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?

    Two problems: First, you'll need to make the lenses an cornea non-invisible (ie: maintain the refractive index they currently have) or you won't be able to focus. Second, you'll need to have significantly more of your eye be opaque, or you'll go blind from all of the stray light. (plus, you wouldn't be able to see clearly, since far more light would be hitting your retinas from the sides and back, than through the lens) An added disadvantage is that with invisible eyelids and hands, it'll be somewhat difficult to block your eyes from bright lights.
  • by Jbrecken ( 107271 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @08:24AM (#833248)
    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.
  • If you are transparent, light passes through you with no effect

    Wrong. It means that light is not absorbed as it passes through you. If you need a demonstration, look at a glass of water. If you can't see it, you need to turn the lights on. Transparent != invisible. To be invisible, you need 1) not to absorb any light, and 2) to match the refractive index of your immediate environment.

    This whole "invisible man" thread came up on sci.optics recently. The best response to "is an invisible man possible" was "Yes: cremation" (I'm paraphrasing.)

  • 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.
  • by skoda ( 211470 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2000 @09:07AM (#833267) Homepage
    While it sides like a great idea, I think it would be extremely difficult to implement:

    1) How to arrange the fibers to cover the body? You need to capture any light incident light with a certain position and angle and route it to where it would propagate had there not been a body in the way.

    2) There would likely be significant signal loss problems. High efficient fiber coupling, such as used for telecom requires good optics and precision positioning. This is because
    2a) A small portion of light incident on the front glass surface is reflected away (think glare on a monitor screen) so you want make efforts to reduce that.
    2b) Fibers have a maximum input angle for incident light, above which the light is lost during propagation through the fiber. This angle is ballpark 30.
    2c) Finally, ray orientation will be lost during propagation through the fiber. Thus, output direction != input direction. That may be a problem.
    2d) Transmission properties are wavelength dependent. Not a huge deal, but another minor factor.

    3) Finally, optical fiber bundles used for imaging, such as in endoscopes, are known for their mediocre image quality. Fibers are not generally a good tool for analog image transmission.

    Ok, class over :)

    -----
    http://movies.shoutingman.com
  • 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.
  • Thats funny, I read it as binary (10 = 2). Are you sure your a geek?
  • we'll all be one degree closer to Kevin Bacon?

  • by Aazz ( 160031 )
    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?
  • The quote is:

    Nelson: "Hey Bart! Your epidermis is showing!"

    *Girls and boys in pool laugh at Bart, who is situated on a tree branch about to dive into the pool*

    Bart: "Wha!? Huh!? Ahhh!"

    *Bart screams as he falls; cut to Nelson talking to Kearney*

    Nelson: "See, your epidermis is your hair. So technically I'm right. Excuse me.."

    *Nelson walks to edge of pool*

    Nelson (pointing at Bart): "Ha Ha!"

    Sorry for the OT post :P
  • 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.
  • 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!

    ...or a Teletubbie.
  • 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 [dc2600.com]
  • Ok. Fine. How is the body supposed to damage something like that? The immune system is designed to fight things made of either cells or protien-coated RNA strands, not vast (relatively) expandes of smooth metal.

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it. -- Franklin P. Jones

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