Subtitles section Play video
-
Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz
-
I'd like to introduce you to an interesting person named Ötzi.
-
He lives in Italy
-
at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology
-
because he's a mummy.
-
This is an artist's rendition of what he might have looked like
-
when he was alive 5,300 years ago.
-
You want to see what he looks like today?
-
(Laughter)
-
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
-
because he was discovered frozen in ice.
-
Ötzi is the oldest mummy that's been discovered with preserved skin.
-
5,300 years is super old,
-
older than the Egyptian pyramids,
-
and Ötzi's skin is covered in 61 black tattoos,
-
all lines and crosses on parts of his body
-
where he might have experienced pain.
-
So scientists think that they might have been used
-
to mark sites for some kind of therapy,
-
like acupuncture.
-
So clearly, if the oldest skin we've seen
-
is all tattooed up,
-
tattooing is a very ancient practice.
-
But fast-forward to today and tattoos are everywhere.
-
Almost one in four Americans has a tattoo,
-
it's a multibillion-dollar industry,
-
and whether you love tattoos or hate them,
-
this talk will change the way you think about them.
-
So, why are tattoos so popular?
-
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
-
cannot be commodified.
-
Right? Your tattoo lives and dies with you.
-
It can't be bought or sold or traded,
-
so its only value is really personal to you,
-
and I love that.
-
Now, I tend to gravitate towards really colorful tattoos
-
because I'm obsessed with color.
-
I teach a whole course on it at my university.
-
But my very first tattoo was an all-black tattoo
-
like Ötzi's.
-
Yep, I did that clichéd thing that young people do sometimes
-
and I got a tattoo in a language I can't even read.
-
(Laughter)
-
OK, but I was 19 years old,
-
I had just returned from my first trip overseas,
-
I was in Japan in the mountains
-
meditating in Buddhist monasteries,
-
and it was a really meaningful experience to me,
-
so I wanted to commemorate it with this Japanese and Chinese character
-
for "mountain."
-
Now, here's what blows my mind.
-
My 14-year-old tattoo
-
and Ötzi's 5,300-year-old tattoos
-
are made of the same exact stuff:
-
soot,
-
that black powdery carbon dust
-
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,
-
soot in this case,
-
that get trapped in the dermis,
-
which is the layer of tissue right underneath the surface of the skin.
-
So in over five thousand years,
-
we've done very little to update tattoo technology,
-
apart from getting access to more colors
-
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.
-
And I began to ask myself,
-
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?
-
Here's my big idea:
-
I believe that tattoos can give you superpowers.
-
(Laughter)
-
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
-
that we don't currently possess.
-
By upgrading the particles, we can engineer tattooing
-
so that it will change not only the appearance of our skin,
-
but also the function of our skin.
-
Let me show you.
-
This is a diagram of a microcapsule.
-
It's a tiny hollow particle with a protective outer shell,
-
about the size of a tattoo pigment,
-
and you can fill the inside with practically whatever you want.
-
So what if we put interesting materials inside of these microcapsules
-
and made tattoo inks with them?
-
What sorts of things could we make a tattoo do?
-
What problems could we solve?
-
What human limitations could we overcome?
-
Well, here's one idea:
-
one of our weaknesses as humans
-
is that we can't see ultraviolet, or UV, light.
-
That's the high-energy part of sunlight
-
that causes sunburn and increases our risk of skin cancer.
-
Many animals and insects can actually see UV light, but we can't.
-
If we could, we'd be able to see sunscreen when it was applied on our skin.
-
Unfortunately, most of us don't wear sunscreen,
-
and those of us who do
-
can't really tell when it wears off, because it's invisible.
-
It's the main reason we treat over five million cases
-
of preventable skin cancer every year in the US alone,
-
costing our economy over five billion dollars annually.
-
So how could we overcome this human weakness with a tattoo?
-
Well, if the problem is that we can't see UV rays,
-
maybe we can make a tattoo detect them for us.
-
So I thought, why don't we take some microcapsules,
-
load it up with a UV-sensitive, color-changing dye,
-
and make a tattoo ink out of that?
-
Now, one of the troubles of being a tattoo technologist
-
is finding willing test subjects.
-
(Laughter)
-
And when it came time to test this tattoo ink,
-
I thought it best not to torture my poor graduate students.
-
So I decided to tattoo a couple of spots on my own arm instead.
-
And It actually worked. Check it out!
-
I call these tattoos solar freckles
-
because they're powered by sunshine.
-
And right now, they're invisible,
-
but as soon as I expose them to a UV light, acting as the Sun --
-
there they are, blue spots.
-
Now, I'm not wearing sunscreen in this video,
-
but if I was, those blue spots would not appear,
-
and then when my sunscreen wore off later,
-
the solar freckles would reappear in UV light
-
and I would know that it was time to reapply sunscreen.
-
So these tattoos act as a real-time, naked-eye indicator
-
of your skin's UV exposure.
-
And of course,
-
I think there are lots of really cool, artistic things you could do
-
with a color-changing tattoo like this,
-
but I hope that it will also help us solve a big problem
-
in skin protection.
-
(Applause)
-
Let me give you another example.
-
Normal human body temperature is about 97 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit,
-
and if you fall outside of that range,
-
you need to seek medical attention right away.
-
Now, the problem is that humans can't detect our own body temperature
-
without a thermometer.
-
Sure, you could try the old hand-on-the-forehead trick,
-
but there's zero scientific evidence to back that up.
-
(Laughter)
-
So what if we could create a tattooable thermometer
-
that you could access anytime?
-
Well, remember how the solar freckles used a UV-sensitive dye
-
inside of the microcapsules of the tattoo ink?
-
Well, you could also put heat-sensitive dyes
-
inside of microcapsules
-
and you could make different tattoo inks
-
that change color at different temperatures.
-
Suppose it was 96, 98, and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
-
If you place those inks side by side,
-
now you have a temperature scale
-
tuned to the human body.
-
In this video, you can see the different patches of tattoos
-
disappearing sequentially
-
as the pigskin we tested them on
-
is heated up.
-
So if you were to place a tattoo like this
-
in a location that was stable to external temperature fluctuations --
-
maybe inside of the mouth, perhaps on the back of the lip? --
-
then you'd be able to read your body temperature anytime
-
by just glancing at your tattoo in the mirror.
-
Amazing, right?
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Another limitation that we have as humans
-
is that our skin doesn't conduct electricity,
-
and that can be a good thing, but not necessarily --
-
(Laughter)
-
if you have an electronic biomedical implant,
-
like a pacemaker for example.
-
Right now, if you have a pacemaker,
-
you need surgery every five or 10 years to replace the battery when it dies.
-
And wouldn't it be nice if, instead,
-
we could simply recharge the battery through a patch of conducting skin?
-
Well, if you were to try to tackle that problem with a tattoo,
-
the first step would be to make a tattoo that conducts electricity.
-
So we've been working on a conducting tattoo ink in my lab.
-
And right now, we're able to increase the conductivity of skin over 300-fold
-
with our conducting tattoo ink.
-
Now, we have a long way to go before we reach the conductivity
-
of something like a copper wire,
-
but we're making progress and I'm really excited about this
-
because I think that it could open up a whole new world of possibility
-
for tattoos.
-
I envision a future where tattoos enable us --
-
tattooable wires and tattooable electronics enable us
-
to merge our technologies with our bodies
-
so that they feel more like extensions of ourselves
-
rather than external devices.
-
So these are a few examples of the new abilities that we can gain
-
by using nanotechnology to upgrade our tattoos,
-
but this really is only the beginning.
-
I believe the sky is the limit for what we can do with high-tech tattoos.
-
In the future, tattoos will not only be beautiful,
-
they'll be functional too.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)