I was just stopped in my (reading) tracks by this headline. And I knew I hadn’t been smoking anything.

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/09/05/see-through-transparent-mice-food-dye/. If you can’t access that, try https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/scientists-use-food-dye-found-in-doritos-to-make-see-through-mice/.

How does bright yellow food coloring turn tissue transparent? To understand why, it’s essential to consider the reason things look opaque in the first place. The bits of our body — cell membranes, proteins, fluids — all cause light to refract, or bend.

If light bends just once — think of a beam of sunlight hitting a sheet of glass — the image it carries is still mostly clear. But as light refracts over and over, off fluids, proteins and other cellular miscellany, it scatters in lots of directions. All that scattered light, Rowlands said, makes it hard to see through — “like watching TV through a glass of milk.”

…By applying textbook physics principles, the researchers were able to screen for molecules that they predicted would, when absorbed by the body, change how biological tissues refract light. They hit on tartrazine, dissolved in water. But the proof was in the experiment. They soaked a slice of raw chicken in a tartrazine solution and found that the chicken turned clear as they increased the amount of tartrazine. When they rubbed that solution onto the skin of mice, they saw internal organs come into view. The tartrazine reduced the amount of refraction, the light scattered less and the tissue appeared clear.

When the dye was washed off, the tissue returned to normal and the scientists reported “minimal systemic toxicity” in the mice.

Other news sites had less dramatic headlines (eg The Guardian: “Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent”; CNN: “Scientific discovery that turns mouse skin transparent echoes plot of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’”.)

And just two of many good news items from this week’s Fix the News:

Cigarette smoking in the United States is at an 80-year low
When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. In the most recent Consumption Habits poll, 11% of U.S. adults say they have smoked cigarettes in the past week, matching the historical low of 2022. A major reason for the decline is that cigarette smoking has plunged among young adults, previously the most likely age group to smoke. Gallup

Ozempic and Wegovy’s final frontier could be ageing
When people lose weight, it has a whole lot of further health benefits: lower chances of heart failure, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, amongst others. A new study that tracked more than 17,600 overweight or obese people who took semaglutide for three years has found that they died at a lower rate from all causes. “It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process.” BBC