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?
我想向各位介紹一個名叫 奧茨的有趣人物。 他住在義大利的 南蒂羅爾考古博物館, 因為他是個木乃伊。 這是藝術家重現 5300 年前 他還活著時的樣子。 你們想看看他今天的模樣嗎?
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
OK, brace yourselves, gross mummy pic coming at you.
坐穩哦,噁心的木乃伊照片來了。
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.
他是沒以前那麼英俊, 然而對木乃伊來說, 他的狀態其實很棒, 因為他被發現的時候是在凍結的冰裡。 在所有被發現仍保有皮膚的 木乃伊中,奧茨是最古老的。 5300 年超老的, 比埃及金字塔更老, 奧茨的皮膚被 61 個 黑色刺青覆蓋著, 全都是交叉的線條, 覆蓋著他身上可能疼痛的各個部位。 因此,科學家認為它們可能被用於 標記某些治療方法, 類似針灸。
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.
如果我們看到的最古老皮膚 全是刺青, 顯然刺青是一種非常古老的做法。 快轉到今天,刺青無處不在。 幾乎四分之一的美國人有刺青, 這是一個價值數十億美元的產業, 無論你喜歡還是討厭刺青, 這個演講都會改變你對它們的看法。
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.
為什麼刺青如此受歡迎? 與奧茨不同,今天我們大多數人 用刺青來做為某種自我表達。 我個人因為喜歡藝術而喜歡刺青, 對我來說,有些東西 美好得幾近浪漫, 有關刺青的藝術形式 無法被商品化。 對吧?你的刺青與你共存。 它不能買賣、交易, 所以,它的確只對你個人有價值, 我很喜歡這樣。
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.
我總被非常豐富多彩的刺青吸引, 因為我迷戀色彩。 我在大學教授一門完整的課程。 但我的第一個刺青是全黑的, 像奧茨那樣。 沒錯,我和年輕人一樣, 有時會做老套的事, 用一種甚至我無法讀懂的語言刺青。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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."
當時我 19 歲, 剛從海外第一次旅行回來, 我在日本山上的佛寺參禪, 對我來說那是非常有意義的經歷, 所以我想用這個日文 和漢字的「山」來紀念它。
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.
如今這讓我大吃一驚。 我紋了 14 年的刺青 和奧茨紋了 5300 年的刺青 用同樣的東西製成: 煙灰, 黑色的粉狀碳, 燃燒後留在壁爐裡的東西。 如果你放得很大仔細看 我的刺青或是奧茨的刺青, 會發現它們看起來都像這樣。 刺青只不過是一堆微小的顏料顆粒, 在這種情況下, 是煙灰被困在真皮中, 那是皮膚表面下的組織層。 因此,在超過五千年的時間裡, 除了有更多顏色和更有效的紋法之外, 我們在更新刺青技術方面少有更動。
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?
我是個藝術家兼科學家, 我帶領一個研究奈米技術的實驗室, 這是一種用超微小物 來構建東西的科學, 甚至微小到人類頭髮寬度 千分之一的等級。 我開始思考, 如何把奈米技術用於刺青呢? 如果刺青只是皮膚中的一堆顆粒, 可不可以將這些顆粒 換成更有趣的東西呢?
Here's my big idea: I believe that tattoos can give you superpowers.
這是我的想法: 我相信刺青可以賦予我們超能力。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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?
我並不是說會讓我們能飛, 但我認為我們能夠擁有超能力, 因為刺青可以帶給我們 目前不擁有的新能力。 我們可以透過顆粒升級來設計刺青, 這樣不僅可以改變皮膚的外觀, 還可以改變皮膚的功能。 讓我示範給你們看。 這是一粒微膠囊的圖。 是個帶有保護外殼的微小空心顆粒, 大小與刺青顏料相當, 你幾乎可以隨心所欲地填充內部。 倘若我們將有趣的材料 放入這些微膠囊內, 用它們作為刺青墨水呢? 可以用刺青做什麼呢? 可以解決哪些問題呢? 可以克服哪些人類的限制呢?
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?
這裡有個想法: 身為人類的弱點之一 就是我們看不到紫外光或紫外線。 這是陽光的高能量部分, 會導致曬傷,增加 罹患皮膚癌的風險。 許多動物和昆蟲實際上 看得到紫外線,但我們不能。 如果看得見的話,我們 能適時地在皮膚上塗抹防曬霜。 不幸的是,大多數人不塗防曬霜, 而塗抹的那些人並不知道 什麼時候應該要補擦, 因為它是看不見的。 僅在美國,每年治療超過 500 萬例可預防性皮膚癌, 年經濟損失超過 50 億美元, 這是主要原因。 那麼,我們如何用刺青 來克服這個人類的弱點呢? 如果問題在於我們看不到紫外線, 也許可以讓刺青為我們偵測紫外線。 所以我想,何不拿一些微膠囊, 填裝對紫外線敏感的變色染料, 用它製作刺青墨水呢?
Now, one of the troubles of being a tattoo technologist is finding willing test subjects.
作為刺青技師的困難之一 就是要找自願被測試的對象。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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.
當要測試這種刺青墨水時, 我認為最好不要 折磨我可憐的研究生。 所以我決定在自己的 手臂上紋幾個點。 它確實有效。看看這個! 我把這些刺青稱為太陽雀斑, 因為它們是由陽光驅動的。 它們此刻隱形; 一旦我將它們暴露在 充當太陽的紫外線下, 藍色斑點,就在那裡。 我沒有在這段影片中擦防曬霜, 但如果有,就不會 出現那些藍色斑點, 當我的防曬霜隨後消失時, 太陽雀斑會再次出現在紫外線下, 我就知道應該補擦防曬霜了。 因此,這些刺青可以作為 肉眼即時可見的 皮膚紫外線暴曬指標。 當然, 我認為可以用這樣顏色變化的刺青 做很多非常酷的藝術性作品, 但我希望它也能幫我們解決 一個保護皮膚的大問題。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
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.
讓我再舉一個例子。 正常人體的體溫約在 華氏 97 至 99 度之間, 如果超出該範圍就需要立即就醫。 現在問題在於如果不用溫度計, 人類無法測到自己的體溫。 當然,你可以使用 手碰額頭的老伎倆, 但是那完全沒有 任何科學根據可佐證。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
So what if we could create a tattooable thermometer that you could access anytime?
如果我們能夠創建 可以隨時看的刺青溫度計呢?
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?
還記得太陽雀斑 如何在刺青墨水的微膠囊內 使用紫外線敏感的染料嗎? 你也可以將熱敏感染料 放在微膠囊內, 你可以製作不同的刺青油墨, 在不同的溫度下改變顏色。 假設它們是華氏 96、98 和 100 度。 如果把這些墨水並排放置, 現在就有了人體溫度計。 在這影片中, 你可以看到不同的 刺青斑塊依次消失, 因為它們所在的 測試豬皮,溫度升高了。 所以,如果你把這樣的刺青 放在一個對外部溫度波動 穩定的位置—— 也許放在嘴裡,嘴唇的後面—— 然後只需看一下鏡子裡的刺青 就可以隨時讀取體溫。 很棒吧?
(Applause)
(掌聲)
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
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 --
身為人類的另一限制 是我們的皮膚不導電, 這可能是一件好事,但未必——
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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.
如果你有電子生物醫學植入物, 例如心律調節器。 現在如果你有心律調節器, 需要每五年或十年動一次手術, 以便在電池耗盡時更換電池。 如果反過來, 透過一片導電皮膚給電池充電, 那不是很棒嗎? 如果你試圖用刺青來解決這個問題, 那麼第一步就是製作會導電的刺青。 所以我們一直在實驗室裡 研究刺青墨水。 而現在,我們可以透過刺青墨水 將皮膚的電導率提高 300 倍以上。 我們還有很長的路要走, 才能達到類似銅線的導電效率, 但我們一直有所進展, 我對此感到非常興奮, 因為我認為這能為刺青的可能應用 打開新世界。 我想像刺青是我們的未來—— 刺青電線和刺青電子產品, 使我們能夠將技術 與我們的身體融合在一起, 使它們感覺更像是我們自己的延伸, 而不是外部的設備。
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.
這是少數幾個我們透過使用奈米技術 以提升刺青來獲得新能力的例子, 但這真的才剛開始。 我相信高科技刺青的應用沒有極限。 在未來,刺青不僅美麗, 還有功用。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)