Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. What happens when a scientist and a celebrity inkslinger put their heads together?

Something you might call magic. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Lily

Jamali. Tattoos are more popular than ever. About a third of Americans have at least one,

according to Pew. But to some, traditional ink can seem a little old-fashioned. That's why

a nano-engineer in Boulder, Colorado teamed up with a tattoo artist to the stars to make a

newer, smarter ink that can appear and disappear at will. Imagine showing off your new tattoo

at a party on Saturday, then disappearing it before that big job interview on Monday.

For the people creating these tech-infused tattoos, vanishing ink might be just scratching the

surface of what tattoos can do. Ray Ellen Beshell from KFF Health News reports.

All right, this is the lab. Carson Bruns is a nano-engineer, and right now his lab at the

University of Colorado Boulder makes tattoo ink. So we have a magenta color and a blue color.

But unlike regular tattoo ink, those colors can disappear. The ink is made of nanoparticles of

dye, encased in beads of plexiglass. The beads are the same stuff as in dermal fillers,

like the stuff people inject to plump up their cheeks. Here, it's the dye that pulls a trick.

Have you ever seen the beer can that's got mountains on it, and they turn blue when it gets cold?

Same idea, except the switch is light instead of temperature. When certain kinds of light hit the

dye, that starts a chemical reaction. And suddenly, where there used to be nothing, now there's a

tattoo. A couple of years ago, Bruns started a company with Bang Bang, real name Keith McCurdy.

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