Originally published at: Scientists make temporarily transparent mice - Boing Boing
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It’s just their skin that becomes transparent, not a whole invisible mouse situation (and it’s just to longer wavelength light), but that is very cool
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Reminds me of Sally Impossible from Venture Bros. (A parody of Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl but her power only extends as far as her skin.)
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Also, the mice really enjoyed a nice 5 minute massage
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Paging the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, would an editor please pick up a white courtesy phone?
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Coming next: a quantum leap in creepy Halloween costumes!
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my childhood, in one image. lol
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Does it improve the flavour?
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Well, the Empire had just been defeated…
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Coming soon to a nudist colony near you: people who aren’t just content with not wearing clothes make their skins themselves transparent.
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This seems very freaky, but then it reminded me of something: there are lots of aquarium fish with transparent flesh. Heck, I’ve got about 15 of them in my tank right now.
I’ve always found that fascinating, and wondered why it’s unheard of in land-dwelling creatures, but so common in freshwater fish.
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That’s a good question. There are actually a few frogs that are partly transparent from below. Not from above though, and all in all though I think that would leave a terrestrial animal really vulnerable, especially to UV. Transparent fish are somewhat protected from that by the water, and even then have had to give up their scales and I think mostly prefer darker habitats. Those are all right sacrifices for a fish to make in exchange for the camouflage it provides (my impression is less being invisible than looking like dead plants).
But on land that wouldn’t work as well because they would still have a different index of refraction than air, and then they’d be missing out on hair or feathers or scales or exoskeletons that most land animals depend on – note these mice have also had to be shaved, so in the wild they’d be cold and easily have their organs sunburned. Some things like naked mole rats do get by with just skin, but then for the same reason they don’t really need any camouflage either.
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Maybe land creatures need the opaque skin for extra sun protection?
I wonder if any of the scientists conducting the experiment tried it on themselves
Edit
@chenille has a much better guess
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chenille has the same guess, they just went on about it longer. 
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Would-be invisible man: “Dammit!”
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Yes, it’s probably true that a transparent land-dweller would have a lot of UV-related issues that aren’t as big a problem for fish. But – pedantry alert! –
Transparent fish … have had to give up their scales
Not all of them. I have a bunch of glowlight tetras (for example), who have transparent flesh but also have scales that seem to have black rims – you can see the pattern of the scales. Meanwhile their cousin, the glass bloodfin tetra, is clear but you can’t see the scales (though it does have scales).
Even ‘scaleless’ fish tend to have scales, though they may be very small.
and I think mostly prefer darker habitats.
Not sure about that, either. In my tank, my one glass bloodfin swims up near the surface, while the glowlights tend to prefer being at the mid-level (~15-30 cm below the surface) during the day, and low/among plants in the evening.
Meanwhile the very-much-opaque rainbowfish are mid-level day and night.
Eh. Who knows what goes through their fishy little brains?
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Oh, very fair point. For some reason I was just thinking of the more fully transparent ones like glass catfish and Indian glass fish. Being catfish, the former do genuinely lack scales, although the latter do not…I am not very sharp today, apologies.
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