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Tattooing is usually a slow and deliberate process that has become very popular in recent decades. You come up with an idea or choose a drawing from a flash drive or folder, and then your artist will draw the image and create a stencil. They talk about design and last-minute adjustments. Finally, your artist will spend the next few hours masterfully painting the color onto your skin.

Getting a tattoo is not only an investment of money, but also an investment of time, not to mention the pain you feel during the application. That is, unless you're a 10-year-old who meets the King of Staten Island on the beach and gives you a free tattoo. This is a bad decision both in the film and after it, but it could have been worse. After the turn, the boy left and ran home. Probably for the best, getting a free tattoo from a stranger on the beach isn't a very big life decision, especially if you're in fifth grade.

But in the future, this child may never return. According to a recent article published in the journal iScience, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a patch that can painlessly transfer an entire tattoo in just a few minutes.

The patch is similar to a bandage, except that it is equipped with a series of small needles to which the patch is usually attached. The needle contains tattoo ink that is designed to stay permanently on the skin. According to the team, the needle is so small that you don't feel it pierce the skin and blood doesn't flow. Most importantly, you can still spray paint safely. It's all about its unusual structure.

Most needles, even the smallest ones, are made of hard materials such as metal, glass, ceramic, or some polymers. These tattoo patch microneedles take a different approach. The needles themselves are made in a container that dissolves the tattoo ink.

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Medical microinjection Photo: Georgia Institute of Technology

The researcher began by placing the needle in the correct position. Today you can make small shapes, letters and numbers. Then color is added and a cap is put on the back of the needle. By pressing the pad on the desired surface, the needle moves into the body. The patch is then left for a few minutes, allowing the needle to dissolve on its own, leaving the dye behind. Because it gets a point of color by injection, the resulting image is reminiscent of retro video games or pixel art. In the future, you will be able to easily create your own pixel art on your computer and display those pixels with microneedles filled with the appropriate color. Just press and in a few minutes permanent pixel art will appear on your body.

The researchers obviously don't think it can replace the traditional tattoo, but it could be an option for those who don't want to endure thousands of hours of charcoal drilling. It may have medical applications including medical alert technology, radiotherapy guidance, and post-operative or cosmetic procedures. In addition, the injection works with black light, which is only visible under ultraviolet light. This can provide additional privacy by permanently recording medical information on your body. It's great too.

Of course, the question arises whether these patches can achieve the same immortality as ordinary tattoos. Tattooing is a perfect art form that has been practiced for thousands of years. We have endless and growing evidence that tattoos are an effective way to leave indelible marks on the skin. Transferring the process to new technology raises some questions about how these tattoo variations compare.

The researchers conducted follow-up after the tattoos were applied and found that the tattoos lasted at least a year and showed no signs of fading. As with any tattoo, the evidence shows that they are permanent. No pain and no chance to go back to bad decisions before it's too late.

In the future, people will have to live in salons where advertising hangs around the clock.

This is just one of our Always Amazed stories, answering your questions about the world of business, big or small. Have you ever wondered if it's worth recycling? Or how do private labels compare to well-known brands? See more of the series here.

Listener Mike Seander from Brooklyn, Maine asks:

The last four laptops I bought cost around $2,000 and were workstation replacements—great machines for running computer-aided design programs. The quality of each notebook line has improved, which seems to confirm the notion that innovation drives down the cost of technology. But surprisingly, they all cost the same. In the tech industry, is value based on what the consumer pays, not how much the device costs to make?

Inflation dominated economic news at the highest level in four decades. Consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 8.3% in August. However, computers fall into a category known as general inflation.

"That means they're going to get cheaper over time," said Avi Greengart, president and principal analyst at Exponential. "As engineers and scientists improve technology and add this new technology to your new laptop, it makes sense that the price seems stable."

For high-end flagship laptops, look for prices ranging from $1,000 to $1,500. Some advanced machines with larger memory capacity and better graphics can cost upwards of $2,000. Greengart added that most people still buy laptops for less than $800, and many school districts that buy computers in bulk sell 200 Chromebooks.

So it costs more to buy a higher-end laptop, but prices for same-tier products tend to fluctuate in the same range over time, says Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. .

The price of Greengart's computers is controversial because it follows Moore's Law, named for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, which describes how advances in semiconductor technology reduce the cost of computing power.

"Over time, engineers and scientists have been able to fit more transistors on a chip," Greengart said.

"Making these chips smaller creates a bigger, better product, allowing them to stay at or below the same price with higher performance over time," he added. “Usually these products get better and cheaper over time. And manufacturers are trying to make it better so you can keep spending the same money.”

Tom Mainelli, vice president of IDC's Device and Consumer Research Group, noted that the PC market is very competitive.

"If someone is selling their product at a higher price than a comparable product, it can be hard to sell," he said.

The epidemic and the cost of technology

Experts noted that the pandemic, which has pushed people out of offices and other gathering places, has changed some consumption habits.

For example, you may need a better webcam, Greengart says, thanks to remote work and limited face-to-face interactions. And some consumers have turned to high-end laptops for their gaming prowess.

Before the Covid-19 crisis, Milanesi said, consumers may not have looked beyond the $1,000 price tag and upgraded their computers in years.

"The computer was probably in our home office or bedroom. We go there to do things like our taxes or things that aren't necessarily fun," Milanesi said. "Then during the Covid season, we started to do more in terms of entertainment and productivity."

Because people were staying home, not traveling or eating out, they felt they needed a new computer to make the most of their limited lifestyle, said IDC's Mainelli.

At the time of the outbreak, according to Greengart, there was a shortage of graphics cards that made it difficult to supply computers. But that trend has changed in the last six to 12 months, as the cryptocurrency crisis has depleted these cards.

"Now we are seeing better supply and lower demand," he said. Most purchases in 2022 or 2023 are must-haves in 2020 and 2021, so getting a laptop is pretty easy.

The global chip shortage has prompted some companies to raise the price of their products by as much as $50 in the first half of 2021, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Consumer Price Index for computers, peripherals (such as monitors and printers), and smart home devices showed that prices rose from the start of the pandemic through early 2022 and are now falling.

Milanesi said that during the epidemic, vendors were careful about supply and didn't want to change prices too much, so they chose to keep only a limited number of computers.

"What he saw was that consumers were buying what was available," he said.

IDC's Mainelli reiterated that point, saying average retail prices can be misleading because people bought better PCs during the pandemic than they did three or five years ago.

In other words, the manufacturers did not raise the price of a computer from $500 to $1,000. Consumers bought these $1,000 PCs for the reasons outlined above: limited supply at the low end and a desire to work and play on more powerful computers while stuck at home.

"If you're a computer vendor and you say, 'Okay, I can only make 100 laptops. Should I make 100 of the cheapest laptops or 100 of the most expensive?' You can imagine how they would react," Menally said.

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