Name: 【TED】Carson Bruns: Could a tattoo help you stay healthy? (Could a tattoo help you stay healthy? | Carson Bruns)
Uploaded: 2019-06-04T22:41:57.000Z
Duration: 10 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz

I'd like to introduce you to an interesting person named Ötzi.

This is an artist's rendition of what he might have looked like

You want to see what he looks like today?

OK, brace yourselves, gross mummy pic coming at you.

So, he's not as handsome as he used to be,

but he's actually in great shape for a mummy

Ötzi is the oldest mummy that's been discovered with preserved skin.

and Ötzi's skin is covered in 61 black tattoos,

all lines and crosses on parts of his body

So scientists think that they might have been used

So clearly, if the oldest skin we've seen

But fast-forward to today and tattoos are everywhere.

Almost one in four Americans has a tattoo,

and whether you love tattoos or hate them,

this talk will change the way you think about them.

Unlike Ötzi, most of us today use tattoos for some kind of self-expression.

Personally, I love tattoos because I love art

and there is something so wonderful to me,

almost romantic, about the way a tattoo as an art form

Right? Your tattoo lives and dies with you.

so its only value is really personal to you,

Now, I tend to gravitate towards really colorful tattoos

I teach a whole course on it at my university.

But my very first tattoo was an all-black tattoo

Yep, I did that clichéd thing that young people do sometimes

and I got a tattoo in a language I can't even read.

I had just returned from my first trip overseas,

and it was a really meaningful experience to me,

so I wanted to commemorate it with this Japanese and Chinese character

that gets left behind in the fireplace when you burn stuff.

And if you zoom way, way in on either my tattoo or Ötzi's tattoos,

you'll find that they all look something like this.

A tattoo is nothing more than a bunch of tiny pigment particles,

which is the layer of tissue right underneath the surface of the skin.

we've done very little to update tattoo technology,

and slightly more efficient methods of installation.

While I'm an artist, I'm also a scientist,

and I direct a laboratory that researches nanotechnology,

which is the science of building things with ultratiny building blocks,

thousands of times smaller even than the width of a human hair.

how could nanotechnology serve tattooing?

If tattoos are just a bunch of particles in the skin,

could we swap those particles out for ones that do something more interesting?

I believe that tattoos can give you superpowers.

Now, I don't mean they're going to make us fly,

but I do think that we can have superpowers

in the sense that tattoos can give us new abilities

By upgrading the particles, we can engineer tattooing

so that it will change not only the appearance of our skin,

It's a tiny hollow particle with a protective outer shell,

and you can fill the inside with practically whatever you want.

So what if we put interesting materials inside of these microcapsules

What sorts of things could we make a tattoo do?

What human limitations could we overcome?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Carson Bruns: Could a tattoo help you stay healthy? (Could a tattoo help you stay healthy? | Carson Bruns)

bunch

access

applause

meditate