The Brief

Mad-scientist kind of moments happen fairly often for nanoengineer Carson Bruns. A few months ago in his lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder, he tested his latest invention on his own arm and asked a colleague for help.

“We were like, ‘OK, we’re going to tattoo ourselves. Can you help us today?’” he said.

The tattoo is like a freckle, a little blue dot. But he can turn it on and off. Like the way a mood ring changes color with temperature, this tattoo changes with light: Ultraviolet light to turn it on, daylight (or even a flashlight) to turn it off.

“You can go to court and turn it off, and then go to the party and turn it on. And then go to Grandma’s house and turn it off,” said Bruns, who is affiliated with the university’s ATLAS Institute, which prides itself on fostering out-of-the-box ideas.

Bruns started a company with tattoo-artist-to-the-stars Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy, along with a former doctoral student. Early next year, they plan to release their first product, Magic Ink, to a group of handpicked artists. The business partners have long-term hopes for smart tattoos that have a health value, but cosmetics are cheaper and simpler to get to consumers than medical devices. So, that’s where they’re starting.

The new ink will enter a market in a moment of flux for the regulation of cosmetics. The FDA steps in to urge a recall if an ink causes a bacterial outbreak but traditionally has not exercised its regulatory might over tattoo ink products as it does with other products that go into the body. (Tattoo inks don’t even have to be sterile.) But following the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, the FDA is expanding its authority over tattoo manufacturers. The agency is now accepting comments on draft guidance about tattoo ink preparation.

Carson Bruns demonstrates how to turn his tattoo on and off: UV light turns it on; a regular flashlight turns it off.

(

Rae Ellen Bichell

/

KFF Health News

)

“To be honest with you, I don’t think either the FDA or the tattoo ink industry really knows what that’s going to look like,” said John Swierk, a chemist at the State University of New York-Binghamton. But, he said, the law does mean “the FDA has a new charge to really ensure that labeling is correct and good manufacturing practices are being followed.”

Bruns said Magic Ink is made of particles of dye, encased in beads of plexiglass — the same polymethyl methacrylate material in those dermal fillers people use to plump their lips. Dermal fillers are FDA-approved, whereas tattoo ink contents can be like a black box.

Swierk said many of the tattoo pigments in use now have been around a long time, which gives some users a base comfort level about their safety. But a new material comes with new unknowns.

“If somebody is going to get tattooed with Magic Ink, they have to accept a degree of uncertainty about what the future is going to hold with that ink,” Swierk said.

A series of tattoo inks change color with exposure to UV light.

(

Rae Ellen Bichell

/

KFF Health News

)

It’s $100 for a half-ounce bottle. That’s a lot more than regular ink costs. If the product takes off, the University of Colorado-Boulder will also benefit, as it owns the intellectual property.

Bang Bang is among a few dozen people, many of them tattoo artists, who are already wearing the ink in their skin.

Tattoo artist Selina Medina has been in the business more than 20 years and used to work for an ink manufacturer. She spends a lot of time advocating for tattoo safety, volunteering with several national and international groups focused on the issue.

“I’d probably give it a year in the market before I would buy it. But it does look really interesting,” said Medina, who is on the board of directors for the Alliance of Professional Tattooists.

Medina hopes this ink is different from the UV inks she saw pop up in the 2000s, which would glow under a black light.

“It seemed like an awesome idea, but then we noticed that it faded really fast,” she said. “It would just disappear. We didn’t know what it did. We didn’t know where it went. And that was just kind of like, ‘What the hell is this stuff?’”

She expects her customers will be clamoring for Magic Ink before she’s ready to purchase it.

Looking further afield, some companies are already investing in technology embedded in the skin. A European company called DSruptive makes injectable thermometers. It said about 5,000 people — living primarily in Sweden, Japan, the U.S., and the United Kingdom — have had the devices installed. Ali Yetisen, an engineer at Imperial College London, said for companies eyeing tech embedded in the skin, diabetes is a big focus.

“That’s where the money is. Most companies invest in this area,” said Yetisen. The dream is to create something like a tattoo that could measure blood sugar in real time, and be long-lasting, he said.

“That’s the holy grail of all medical diagnostics,” he said.

While Bruns’ inventions sense external factors like light and radiation, for manufacturers looking to develop in-body tech that reacts to the blood, there are other scientific hurdles. The immune system forms little shells around foreign bodies, effectively putting up a wall between a sensor and the blood.

No one has really figured a way around that yet, said Yetisen, but a lot of people are trying.

Celebrity tattoo artist Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy shows a small red heart tattoo created with Magic Ink.

(

Jorge Torres

)

After copper wire theft left the Sixth Street Bridge in darkness for years, the city of Los Angeles has hired a Pasadena-based engineering firm to restore the lighting, a move aimed at improving safety for Boyle Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods.

City officials contracted Tetra Tech to relight the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown LA and the Eastside.

Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs led to nearly 2,000 streetlight service requests in Boyle Heights in 2024. Nearly seven miles of copper wire have been reported stolen from the Sixth Street Bridge.

Tetra Tech began working on the project’s design in January and is scheduled to restore the wiring to all lights along the bridge, including along roadways, barriers, ramps, stairways and arches before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Los Angeles that summer, according to a Feb. 18 news release from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office.

The firm – which was selected by the city’s Bureau of Engineering – will fortify the pull boxes, service cabinet and conduits to protect against copper wire theft. Tetra Tech will also install a security camera system to deter vandalism and theft.

“When our streets are well-lit, our neighborhoods feel safer and more connected,” Jurado said in the news release. “The Sixth Street Bridge plays a vital role in connecting Angelenos between the Eastside and the heart of the City.”

Jurado – who pledged to look into fixing the Sixth Street Bridge lights when she was elected in 2024 – said the partnership with Tetra Tech “moves us one step closer to restoring one of the City’s most iconic landmarks as a safe, welcoming public space our communities deserve.”

According to officials, the total contract value with Tetra Tech is $5.3 million, which includes work on the Sixth Street Bridge as well as the Sixth Street PARC project, which encompasses 12 acres of recreational space underneath and adjacent to the bridge.

The PARC project will make way for sports fields, fitness equipment, event spaces and a performance stage. PARC’s grand opening is anticipated later this year.

Because the work for the PARC project and the bridge is connected, the Board of Engineers recommended using the existing PARC contract with Tetra Tech to ensure completion ahead of the 2028 Games, officials said.

The cost for the design work on the bridge alone is roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, Jurado announced that her streetlight repair crew had restored lighting and strengthened infrastructure for more than 400 streetlights across her district, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and El Sereno. Next, they plan to tackle repairs in downtown L.A.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.