we've been watching the skies for years, especially after WWII, and what have we found?  
crazy stories and a few shaky videos and all sorts of sightings of some kind of lights.

no evidence.  no footprints, no landing tracks, no entities, no crashed material (presuming the Roswell thing was just a balloon, and I'm not aware of any REAL evidence otherwise).  
no alien visitations.  no close saucer flybys.

media portrayals have led people into interpreting aerial sightings as saucers etc.

I don't think they're real.  I think the whole thing is a psyop, maybe from our subconsciouses, maybe some government shenanigans.

maybe, dare I say, demonic.  many people of faith accept there there are spirit beings (angels, demons) and many of them hostile.

I'm sure we all realize that Australia had huge empty areas that make it difficult to transport stuff.

last few years they've been using 'truck trains', large trucks with multiple trailers, on certain long, empty runs.

now, as thread title indicates, they're using AI trucks, on special AI only highways.

https://safetowork.com.au/world-first-au...e-pilbara/

The autonomous fleet represents another win for safety in the mining industry. Removing operators from behind the wheel eliminates the risks associated with fatigue.
Critically, grade separation will ensure that there is no interaction between the road trains on the haul road and vehicles using public roads.

well if we can have separate rail roads no reason we can't have separate AI roads.  I certainly don't want any AI vehicles on my roads.

FBI congratulating themselves on another Khan capture...

Quote:“The defendant was allegedly determined to kill Jewish people here in the United States, nearly one year after Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel. This investigation was led by the FBI, and I am proud of the terrific work by the FBI team and our partners to disrupt Khan's plan.” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI will continue to work closely with our partners to investigate and hold accountable those who seek to commit violence in the name of ISIS or other terrorist organizations. Fighting terrorism remains the FBI’s top priority.”

As alleged in the complaint, Khan, who resided in Canada, attempted to travel from Canada to New York City, where he intended to use automatic and semi-automatic weapons to carry out a mass shooting in support of ISIS at a Jewish center in Brooklyn, New York. Khan began posting on social media and communicating with others on an encrypted messaging application about his support for ISIS in or about November 2023, when, among other things, Khan distributed ISIS propaganda videos and literature. Subsequently, Khan began communicating with two undercover law enforcement officers (collectively, the UCs).

During those conversations, Khan confirmed that he and a U.S.-based ISIS supporter (Associate-1) had been planning to carry out an attack in a particular U.S. city (City-1). Among other things, Khan said that he had been actively attempting to create “a real offline cell” of ISIS supporters to carry out a “coordinated assault” in City-1 using AR-style rifles to “target[] Israeli Jewish chabads . . . scattered all around [City-1].” During subsequent conversations, Khan repeatedly instructed the UCs to obtain AR-style assault rifles, ammunition, and other materials to carry out the attacks, and identified the specific locations in City-1 where the attacks would take place. Khan also provided details about how he would cross the border from Canada into the United States to conduct the attacks. During these conversations with the UCs, Khan emphasized that “Oct 7th and oct 11th are the best days for targeting the jews” because “oct 7 they will surely have some protests and oct 11 is yom.kippur.”

On or about Aug. 20, Khan changed his target location from City-1 to New York City. After initially suggesting certain neighborhoods in New York City to the UCs, Khan decided to target Location-1, a Jewish center located in Brooklyn, New York. Khan told the UCs that he planned to carry out this attack on or around Oct. 7, 2024 — which Khan recognized as the one-year anniversary of the brutal terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas, a designated FTO, which, on Oct. 7, 2023, launched a wave of violent, large-scale terrorist attacks in Israel. In support of his choice of New York City as his target location, Khan boasted that “New york is perfect to target jews” because it has the “largest Jewish population In america” and therefore, “even if we dont attack a[n] Event[,] we could rack up easily a lot of jews.” Khan proclaimed that “we are going to nyc to slaughter them,” and sent a photograph of the specific area inside of Location-1 where he planned to carry out the attack.

Thereafter, Khan continued to urge the UCs to acquire AR-style rifles, ammunition, and other equipment for his attack, including “some good hunting [knives] so we can slit their throats.” Khan repeatedly reiterated his desire to carry out the attack in support of ISIS, and discussed planning for the attack, including by identifying rental properties close to Location-1 and paying for a human smuggler to help him reach and cross the border from Canada into the United States. During one communication, Khan noted that “if we succeed with our plan this would be the largest Attack on US soil since 9/11.”


On or about Sept. 4, as Khan said he planned to do in connection with his attack, Khan attempted to reach the U.S-Canada border. To do so, Khan used three separate cars to travel across Canada towards the United States, before he was stopped in or around Ormstown, Canada, approximately 12 miles from the U.S.-Canada border.

Khan is charged with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The FBI New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles Field Offices are investigating the case. The Justice Department is grateful to Canadian law enforcement for their actions in this matter. The Office of International Affairs of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is seeking the extradition of Khan from Canada.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kaylan E. Lasky and David J. Robles for the Southern District of New York and Trial Attorney Kevin C. Nunnally of the Justice Department’s National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting the case.

I've had this on my mind for a while now. My thought is this.

The internet was originally thought to of brought us all closer together. To spread information, and connect with one another. Distance was supposed to be a thing of the past, when it comes to relationships. Distance was no longer a factor in spending time with friends and loved ones. The internet was originally thought to of brought the world closer, as we share our lives, experiences, opinions and ideas with one another. 

The actual result is quite the opposite. 

So many opinions floating around that they've lost all value. We see fit to argue over the slightest differences of an opinion. We ridicule and mock anything that is different, as if it's somehow "wrong" just because it's not our own opinions.

We have been flooded with so much misinformation, that we don't know fact from fiction when it's right in front of our faces.

There has been so much misinformation spread that we can longer share anything that is actually Truth, without being bombarded with negative views about the facts we are trying to relate and share.

Every bit of intelligence put out on the internet is abruptly hit with counterintelligence. 

If one were to share too much of the truth that person will get into some sort of "trouble." Sharing an actual truth is something that could get them into deep water, and so it's not even safe, really, to share something with facts and proof these days.

Information is highly regulated, so even coming up with proof js damn near impossible. To even "hypothesize" on the internet these days is counterproductive. If it's not bots, or foreign agents, or local bs, then it's some dumb ass troll ripping up any good* ideas.

Sad part is, the majority of people listen to everything else.

So, much so, that people have no desire to write about anything anymore. Nothing other than politics, anyways.

((Plus the fake lives everyone has on Facebook and Instagram))

If I step back and look at this, I realized something...


The Internet is dead.

Words have lost all meaning.....because of too many words.

We've been there, and done that.

Nothing left to impress us.

The internet was a powerful tool that could have been used for more good. The constant barrage of words and opinions and misinformation has destroyed tge usefulness of the internet; and has such taken away the power of our voice. 


I believe this is by design. It has served to confuse us and control us, while we typed away in our "free speech" we have inadvertently killed our words; our voices. If anything, severely weakened our voices.



Has the internet helped, or hurt us? Social media sure hasn't "helped" anything, other than ego.


That's my two cents of another worthless internet opinion. 

Kudos, internet. You beat us at our own game. 

People don't even believe in truth anymore. They only believe in what suits them. This is a thousand fold worse since social media came on the scene.

How long before our words have lost all their meaning...

Or, have they already?

For FlickerOfLight so they have something new to read!

Quote:Police chiefs of America's largest cities have published the first guide about UAPs, which details chilling encounters and how officers can report such incidents.

The 11-page document warned that unidentified flying objects 'pose significant safety risks to law enforcement air support units,' urging teams to be vigilant when in helicopters.

The aircraft was carrying several hundred pounds of Lithium Ion Batteries in the forward cargo hole. Big conspiracy.... If the satellite videos are real and not fake we are dealing with an event above most people's pay grade !

Quote:What really happened to Malaysian Airlines fight MH370? 10 years ago... Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its intended destination in Beijing. But It never arrived and neither did the 227 passengers and 12 crew members whose family members have been in anguish ever since. What happened to their loved ones? Who's covering up the real story? 10 years have now passed and we finally might have some leads as to what caused this disappearance. Ashton Forbes has in many ways devoted his life to figuring out what happened here and we decided to invite Ashton on to talk about some of this new evidence.

Quote:Catch one if you can



As I tell my students, humans think in pictures. Our minds are full of images. We visualize things we like or dislike, desire, dream about, and want to achieve, then we encode those pictures and transmit them to others, or receive them from others, using something we call language.

Languages are like file formats — some people transmit TIFs, or GIFs, or PNGs, or JPGs. If you have the proper algorithms, you can encode and transmit your pictures to someone else, or decode their transmissions and rebuild their images in your head. If you don’t have the proper algorithms, then what you send or receive is gibberish.

There are three aspects to language: grammar, which is the actual grid on which the pixels (words) are laid out; logic, which is the bit size, or amount of information, in your pixels; and rhetoric, which is the bandwidth you use to transmit and receive.

The more accurate and sophisticated your aspects are, the higher the resolution, the greater the color depth, and the more accurate your transmissions are. The more languages you know, the more file types you can encode and decode, send and receive.

The interesting thing about languages is that each one adds its own flair to the images, with some being better at color reproduction, others higher in resolution, and still others offering faster and more accurate transmission. Pronunciation and enunciation are the means by which we attenuate the frequencies and control “noise” to ensure accurate transmission.


Some languages require a lot of bandwidth to transmit even simple images. Others are very efficient, with compression algorithms and self-correcting carrier waves. Some have vast amounts of metadata in the headers (connotation), while others almost none.

Idioms are highly specialized compression techniques, allowing large amounts of information to be transmitted with relatively few bits of data. Idioms are “function calls” that reference shared databases, like metaphors and allusions, that are culturally unique. For instance, I can say, “Mona Lisa,” and those eight sounds reference an entire cultural database that we share, allowing me to reference large amounts of information that I don’t need to transmit.

In language, resolution (# of pixels) is known as lexicon, or sheer number of words available. Latin has a lexicon of 40,000 words, Spanish has 93,000, Indonesian has 127,000, German offers 145.000, and Mandarin boasts roughly 375,000 words.

English has a resolution of 600.000 words, and possibly upwards of a million if one includes various jargons and specialized terms — the highest resolution language on the planet. As a writer, I am fortunate that English is my native tongue, and that my teachers were master artists when it came to painting verbal pictures. We might think of English as the TIF format of languages…uncompressed with high resolution and layers of data in the same file.



I am rather fastidious when it comes to the pixels, er…words I choose. I use them for their common definitions, as well as their etymology (history, origins). I especially do not allow special interest groups to redefine words to fit their agendas. Nor do I allow groups to arbitrarily change the grammar to purposely dumb it down. Both of these are deliberate efforts to seal off cultural databases with “dangerous” ideas, so that they can not be accessed by the general population.

We may not use “thou, thee, thy, thine” anymore, but we should still know what it means (informal “you”) and how to conjugate verbs with it. If not, then suddenly just about any English text pre-1800 is that much harder to decipher.

Spelling is absolutely vital to the English language. We have 16 vowel sounds, and spelling is the key to recognizing short and long sounds in written words. If you type “travelling” into Microshaft Word, using the English (United States) dictionary, it will be highlighted as incorrect. However, without the double “L,” the rules of grammar say that the word is pronounced “traveeling”. This is a subtle but effective way of walling off data from general access.

American English is under full-on attack. Someone is trying to block young minds from accessing information from the past. Efforts to normalize urban patois, or erase gender, or modify definitions are purposely blocking people from accessing information. They are manipulating our pictures to ensure we can not see accurate images from the past.


They are actually trying to create a New Speak dictionary, in which there is no concept of “liberty,” “freedom” or “individual”. We can not see information that is not there.

For example, English is one of the least gendered languages I can think of, certainly among the European language groups. The only gender in English grammar is third-person singular pronouns (he, she, it), and a handful of nouns (actor/actress, aviator/aviatrix). Perhaps some Asian languages, like Indonesian, have even less gender built in, but languages like German and French are incomprehesible without noun gender.

Language is an incredible tool. It allows us to see the pictures that were in the minds of humans thousands of years ago, but only because we have the algorithms to reconstruct them. If we allow those algorithms to be deleted, then even English will become as inscrutable as Egyptian hieroglyphics were before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Language and culture are inseparable. Language is how we transmit our hopes and aspirations, history and traditions, experience and warnings to future generations. That is why it is under attack.

Someone wants us to be cast adrift, without a past or a future, unable to transmit our pictures and form communities of those who share those pictures.

If a word is a color, then connotation is the hue and saturation. Someone is trying to change the color of the sky to green, and make it a dark forboding green at that. They want us to be repulsed by colors like “freedom” and “individual,” and see repulsive colors like “servitude” and “collective” as bright and gay.

Just now, did the word “gay” conjure images of “happy, carefree,” or “homosexual males”? If the latter, then your language is being manipulated.

For those who dispair that we humans have no power, it is time to realize that power spills from your lips every waking moment. Power flows from your fingers at every keyboard, and with pen and paper. Power swirls like a maelstrom in your mind, whether you channel it to useful work or not.

If you are an English speaker, you have an arsenal of 26 characters, with 44 phonemes, and well over 600,000 rounds of ammunition. If you are a polyglot, you multiply your power with additional arsenals. Like electricity, though, if it is not harnessed and channelled from source to load, then it does no useful work — it communicates nothing, it creates nothing, it defends nothing. You can not hit a target if you do not aim at it.

Our most cherished inheritance and most valuable legacy is our language. We must protect it with our lives and transmit it to our children. There is nothing that empowers us more than the language we so often take for granted. Language is the pavement that turns a path into a road.

"Si non possum caelum moveo, infernum erigam,” said Julius Caesar. If I can not move Heaven, then I shall raise Hell.

Our film of the day comes in the form of a documentary called The Linguists (2008), which follows two language specialists across literal hell nad high water to document and preserve languages on the verge of extinction — an amazing story about language and passion.

Quote:The Story Went Like This… Inside the Integratron?



I was told the story in segments over the course of four decades:

I recall the first discussion being in the spring or summer of 1974. My family was living in West Virginia and my dad had pulled out his old magazines which included the now classic Look and LIFE issues [1] on UFOs. I recall it was one of those Sunday afternoons mentioned previously because I have a memory of looking at the color funny pages that day and those were featured only in the Sunday newspaper.

During a discussion on what UFOs might be, he vaguely alluded to having learned about something that crashed in the New Mexico desert years before he was in the air force. He suggested that it might have been from another world. Imagine my intrigue.

The next time I recall it coming up was during a TV show about UFOs sometime in 1975, after we had returned to California. I had recently seen the Sun Classic Pictures’ release of The Outer Space Connection [2]. Again, my father alluded to the possibility that something from another world had crashed in New Mexico. By this time, my sisters and I had many times heard his stories about his days at George AFB and of Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Iven Kincheloe and the altitude chamber.

When Columbia Pictures released Steven Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind [3] a couple of years later, I was hooked on the UFO mystery. Between the popularity of the film and the growing number of UFO related shows on television in the year or so leading up to it, our family could not avoid the discussion. Again my dad alluded to the crash in New Mexico and this time he said that what had crashed was a small craft, and there was an additional detail: He said the people aboard the craft were not like the aliens that had begun to appear in UFO stories, certainly not like the little beings in Spielberg’s film.

How did he know?

Because he had seen the bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB in the late 1950s, so he said.

The next time we had a significant conversation about the subject was in 1980 when I discovered William Moore’s and  Charles Berlitz’ book The Roswell Incident. I showed the book to my dad but he merely glanced through it, more insistent that the beings on the craft were not little aliens, rather they were like us and virtually hairless. He also said there was nothing to fear from these beings. And, he added, the 1947 incident in New Mexico was not the only time such a thing had happened.

Six years later, I was revisiting everything I had learned about the UFO phenomenon to that time. It was in the spring of 1986 when I sat down with all my UFO books and re-examined them, coming to a new and unexpected personal insight: There was something very earthly going on with this stuff. At the time, my suspicion was that secret military technology might indeed explain much of the reports. I was certainly not the first guy to consider that idea but for me it was eye-opening in its implications. I thought of my what my dad had been saying over the years about the Roswell case. He could very well have learned something about it while in the air force.

By this time, my mentor had begun to work with me and I was hearing things from him that augmented what my dad had been saying about the 1947 New Mexico incident. Within two years, I would be reporting for duty with the FBI [4], and just a few years after that would come the next major leap forward in my dad’s tale.

Wilson

But I mustn’t get ahead of myself for there’s an episode in my life which I later realized had bearing on this Wilson business. I’m referring to 1987 when I first visited the Integratron in Landers, California, out by Yucca Valley. I’d been working at a hospital while waiting for FBI employment. My jobs were cashier part of the week and physical therapy aide two days per week. Turned out that the head of the PT department was a USAF veteran and enthusiast of weird stuff including UFOs and esoteric technology – and when he was a kid was acquainted with George W Van Tassel, the builder of the Integratron. After an interesting story about a camping trip in Yucca Valley and meeting Van Tassel the first time, he suggested I go out and see the curious structure myself. I did just that three days later, taking along a friend and her boyfriend. I also took along my Ruger handgun (just in case) (at the suggestion of my mentor). The short version is that there were rough-looking glaring men parked outside the Integratron when we got there and two vehicles came speeding from the direction of old Giant Rock Airport, apparently alerted by our presence. The weird thing is that my friend, Tracy, was describing her psychic viewing of some individuals inside the Integratron at that moment. She said there was a smaller man being bullied by two large men – and there was a third man, older, urbane and well dressed, who somehow knew we were there. She said he knew our names!

With the vehicles speeding our way – a small white compact sedan and a small yellow pickup truck – I decided we could look from somewhere else and I got us out of there, heading back to Highway 62, where I pulled over beside a bunch of boulders stacked high enough to give a vantage point. We had no longer pulled over and got out of the car to climb the rocks than here came the yellow pickup and the white sedan. They pulled over and stopped just a few car lengths behind our car. A man got out of the pickup and ran back to speak to the female driver of the white car, both of them watching us. I told my friends it was time to go, so we got into our car and I turned back to Yucca Valley. The man ran back to his pickup and he and the white car did a U-turn and followed us. We sped back to town, pulling into the Carl’s Jr at Old Woman Springs Road and the main drag through the town of YV. The pickup and car turned back and went away. Though we intended to eat, we hit the restrooms first. As I waited for them, I noticed an older gentleman dressed very neatly in jeans, plaid western shirt with pearl buttons, and perfectly cut silver hair, clean shaven. He was reading a paperback (which I wish I could recall the title) but had no tray, no food, no drink. And he was calmly smiling. I got a feeling about him.

When my friends came out from the restrooms, I told them we weren’t staying. As we walked past the man at the table, he closed his book and got up and followed us out! We walked to our car and got in – his small white pickup truck happened to be parked next to our spot, oddly. Yes, he followed us out of the parking lot and all the way through town and back toward Interstate 10. If you’ve been out there, you know it’s not a few blocks, to say the least. When it was clear that we were heading away from the area as fast as possible, the gentleman’s pickup did a U Turn and headed back to Yucca Valley. There is no way it was a mistake. He intended to follow us.

Who was he? Had he been the man Tracy ‘saw’ inside the Integratron? He certainly would have had time to change into the jeans and western shirt and head to Carl’s Jr in town before we got there.

In 1991 my father was hospitalized for a blood clot. I was working in New York as a counterintelligence specialist for the FBI and flew out on short notice, that’s how concerned we were for his life. Naturally, being the one who lived farthest away, by the time I could quickly get a flight to California, and drive directly from the airport, he had made it through the danger zone. He was still heavily sedated when I walked into his hospital room.


It was the next day when I was alone with him for a couple of hours that my dad started muttering about a ‘crystal house’ and a man getting killed. He seemed agitated. And then he mentioned the name for the first time: Wilson.

At the time I had no idea who this Wilson was or what his significance might have been. My sisters came into the room just moments after he was saying this stuff so I didn’t press him and said nothing to them about it. I did call my mentor as soon as I got to a phone at my mom’s house.

“Was there anyone else in the room when he was talking about Wilson?” he asked.

I told him there was not. The nurse was at the station and I was alone with my dad.

“Good,” he said, “Keep him off that subject when anyone else is around, if you can.”

I asked about Wilson.

“We’ll talk about Wilson when I see you next time.”

I was hooked.

All I learned over the years from my mentor is that Wilson was the smartest man in the world whom you’d never heard about. What I learned from my mentor is that Wilson had been the civilian in charge of the deeply classified project my dad had been assigned to in 1958 – the strange project for which he claimed to have been briefed on Roswell, all of which I wrote about in my book Shimmering Light. The next person who seemed to know about Wilson was my friend Joseph P Farrell the summer we met at a conference, and he was surprised I knew much about Wilson. Joseph introduced me to the Harbinson book Genesis which features a (VERY) loose adaptation of the mysterious Wilson. In the years that followed, I learned about the Sonora Aero Club and much more than I previously knew about the 1896 Airship Mystery – both legends which featured multiple genius Wilsons. The last bit I learned about Wilson was from my father in the last year of his life. He told me that Wilson had been doing hush-hush research into an alternative fuel source in the California Channel Islands. These are the islands of which Catalina is one along with the others mostly controlled by the US Navy where deeply secret exotic technology research is conducted – and is likely the true explanation for the wildly exaggerated Tic Tac UFO report. The source of the alternative fuel which Wilson was investigating, according to my father, was rather curious.

It was apples.

Were ‘apples’ a code for something? My father didn’t say. He died before I could get anything more on Wilson. My mentor died a few years later, not telling me anymore about Wilson. But I suspect Wilson may have known something about me. After all, my mentor told me that my dad had worked for the man back in ‘58 on the secret project.


It may be that I sort of met Wilson. On that day I first went to the Integratron in 1987, in the Carl’s Jr in Yucca Valley at the corner of Old Woman Springs Road.

Stranger things have indeed happened since then.

– Walter Bosley

Here is yet another story of child violence and murder. This story is of a 6 year old murdering his 2 year old brother. 

Police say 6-year-old boy stabbed 2-year-old brother to death in Joliet
by Adam Harrington
9/6/2024 · 10:36 PM EDT


JOLIET, Ill. (CBS) -- A 6-year-old boy stabbed his 2-year-old brother to death in Joliet late Friday afternoon, police said.

Joliet police were called at 5:04 p.m. to the 2700 block of Fairway Drive, near Pembroke Road, for a child who had been stabbed. They found the 2-year-old boy in the house with multiple stab wounds, police said.


A preliminary investigation determined the toddler had been stabbed with a kitchen knife by his 6-year-old brother, police said.

Numerous questions remained Friday night about what exactly happened.

The 2-year-old was taken to Ascension St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet in an ambulance. He died at the hospital, police said.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has been notified and is investigating, police said.
https://ssnews.page.link/p8FKvRJ9ww7U4k2E8

I know every time I bring up the fact that violent crimes, done by young children, is on the rise, people dismiss it as ramped up media.
Well, The numbers are there, and law enforcement agrees.

I recently had a conversation with my brother in law, who has been Law Enforcement for 26 years, with the same force. I asked him directly, "Have you seen a rise in violent crimes by young children?"

His answer was an absolute, yes. He has seen more violent crimes performed by young kids, in the last 5 years or so, than in his entire 26 year career. He also stated that the numbers of these crimes are rising, as well the crimes becoming more and more violent and weird. 

This is not just something the MSM has ramped up. This is a real problem, and it's getting worse. 

There is a common factor in these crimes by these kids...

Medication.

The majority of the children committing these crimes are medicated. Most, not all.


Medications aren't always the answer. Tablets arent the answer. 

The proof is in the pudding.

This will only get worse.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-food-dye/

Quote:Scientists Make Living Mice’s Skin Transparent with Simple Food Dye
New research harnessed the highly absorbent dye tartrazine, used as the common food coloring Yellow No. 5, to turn tissues in living mice clear—temporarily revealing organs and vessels inside the animals
By Lauren J. Young

Skin normally scatters light, a phenomenon represented by white lines in the beginning of this clip. When the food, drug and cosmetic dye Yellow No. 5 is absorbed by skin, however, it reduces scattering and allows light to penetrate deeper, making the tissue transparent. (This technique has not been tested on humans. Dyes may be harmful. Always exercise caution with dyes and do not consume them directly, apply them to people or animals or otherwise misuse them.)

Keyi “Onyx” Li/U.S. National Science Foundation


In mere minutes, smearing mice with a common food dye can make a desired portion of their skin almost as transparent as glass.
In a study published today in Science, researchers spread a solution of the dye tartrazine, a common coloring for foods, drugs and cosmetics, onto living mice to turn their tissues clear—creating a temporary window that revealed organs, muscles and blood vessels in their body. The procedure—a new form of a technique known as “optical tissue clearing”—has not yet been tested in humans, but it may someday offer a way to view and monitor injuries or diseases without the need of specialized imaging equipment or invasive surgery.

“One unique part about our strategy is that we are changing the optical properties of the tissue directly,” says the study’s lead author Zihao Ou, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Skin, like most mammalian tissue, is highly opaque because its mix of water and densely packed lipids, proteins and other essential molecules scatters light in all different directions. “The concept is similar to bubbled water,” Ou explains. “When you have water and air, both of them are transparent separately. However, if you mix them together, you form microbubbles that are no longer transparent.” Think of a rushing river or a crashing wave. The change in clarity comes because water and air molecules have different refractive indexes—the amount of light that bends passing through an object or substance. The fats and proteins in rodent and human skin typically have higher refractive indexes than the water, which creates a contrast that you can’t see through. In the new study, Ou and his colleagues looked for light-absorbing molecules that could make the various refractive indexes within the layers of skin more similar—essentially reducing the amount of light scattered throughout.

Photographs of “scattering phantoms,” or samples that mimic the optical distribution of human tissue, composed of agarose hydrogels. The phantoms contain increasing concentrations of tartrazine and the same concentration of silica particles. The scale bar represents five millimeters.

Guosong Hong/Stanford University

The team investigated 21 different synthetic dyes before landing on the highly absorbent tartrazine, more commonly known as Yellow No. 5. The zingy lemon-yellow coloring is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be used in limited quantities in foods, drugs and cosmetics. It’s commonly found in chips, sodas, candies, butter, vitamins and drug tablets. Tartrazine makes the refractive indexes of molecules it encounters more uniform and lets through red and yellow light, similar to the color of underlying tissue. At the same time, the dye absorbs most light at wavelengths in the near-ultraviolet and blue spectrums and decreases the scattering of those types of light. “The higher the absorption, the more efficient the molecule is,” Ou explains. The FDA’s limits on chemicals and additives in foods causes the food industry to look “for chemicals that are extremely efficient,” even in small amounts.


The researchers tested various concentrations of the dye on “scattering phantoms” (square samples that mimic the optical distribution of human tissues) and slices of raw chicken breast. They then gently massaged the dye onto the skin of anesthetized mice, where it was absorbed like a “facial cream,” Ou says. In less than 10 minutes, the team began to see internal features beneath the top layers of tissue under visible light—rubbing tartrazine onto the animals’ stomach revealed the digestive tract in action, and spreading it onto one of their legs exposed muscles. Using high-resolution laser imaging, the scientists also saw details of nerves in the gastric system, small units in muscles called sarcomeres and, when the dye was applied to the mice’s scalp, even structures of the brain’s blood vessels. If the tartrazine wasn’t washed off, the effect lasted about 10 to 20 minutes before the skin returned to its original state.
A still image of a real-time video demonstrates the optical transparency in a mouse abdomen, enabling the visualization of the animal’s abdominal organs. The scale bar represents 5 mm. (The red hue is from the dye.)

“Achieving Optical Transparency in Live Animals with Absorbing Molecules,” by Zihao Ou et al., in Science, Vol. 385. Published online September 5, 2024

Past research that rendered skin transparent focused on introducing already transparent materials, including glycerol and fructose solution. Those molecules were also able to reduce light scattering but were “not as efficient [as tartrazine] because they are not ‘colored’ enough,” says Guosong Hong, a materials science engineer at Stanford University and senior author of the new paper. Other approaches that remove essential molecules in tissues rather than adding new ones accomplish similar effects but can only be done in nonliving animals or biopsied tissue. For example, Oregon Health & Science University dermatologist Rajan Kulkarni worked on an optical tissue clearing project in 2014 in which researchers completely dissolved the lipids from whole organs and animals and replaced them with clear hydrogel. “That was always a limitation, it required something to be ex vivo. We had to remove the tissues or remove the organ, or the organism itself was no longer living,” says Kulkarni, who was not involved in the new study. “This method [in the new paper] is interesting because it does allow the skin, or the epidermal layer, [in living animals] to be made transparent so that you can visualize what is underneath.”
While it is far from human trials, the concept may someday have helpful medical applications. Hong proposes it could potentially assist in the early detection of skin cancer and make laser-based tattoo removal more straightforward. It could also make veins more visible for drawing blood or administering fluids via a needle—especially in elderly patients with veins that would be difficult to locate—he says. In some cases, such a strategy may be a more compelling option than the use of imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. “I can definitely see this could be useful for mouse and other kinds of animal visualizing experiments because it would give you the ability to visualize at light microscopy resolution, whereas other methods of MRI, CT [computed tomography], ultrasound are not as finely resolved,” Kulkarni says. “In terms of a proof of concept, it’s really fantastic. Clinically, it remains to be seen.”
The researchers didn’t observe any adverse side effects in the mice after the dye was removed. Ou says that tartrazine and similar, more efficient molecules must be further tested for human safety, however. Tartrazine can cause allergic reactions. And although the coloring is FDA-approved, the agency has strict limitations on amounts used in products. In the study, the mice were able to tolerate the highest concentration used, 0.6 molar, during the short testing periods. But “human skin is about 10 times thicker than [that of] mice, which means that the time required for diffusion is probably much greater—a few minutes for mice is going to be hundreds of minutes for humans,” Ou says. “We hope that with our initial work, there will be more follow up proposing new molecules that are going to be more efficient and safer for human application.”