SKIRMISHER

Here’s a new something that could potentially moot your life’s mission of stealing all soiled underwear in your neighborhood: self-cleaning wool and silk fabric using nanotechnology.

Wool socks, skirts and silk ties may soon clean themselves of smells and stains in the sunshine, researchers in Australia and China suggest.

Wool and silk, which are composed of natural proteins called keratins, are among the most prized and widely used fabrics in the clothing industry. However, they are difficult to keep clean and are easily damaged by conventional cleaning agents.

In the new study, scheduled for publication in the journal Chemistry of Materials, Dr Walid Daoud of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues prepared wool fabrics with and without a nanoparticle coating - particles around five nanometres across (five billionths of a metre) composed of anatase titanium dioxide, a substance already used as a pigment that is known to break down and destroy contaminants upon exposure to sunlight.

“The self-cleaning technology in our work uses titanium dioxide photocatalyst that when triggered by light, it decomposes dirt, stains, harmful microorganisms and so on,” says Dr Daoud.

Thanks, Ross Horgan!

{Related, if you’re that kind of person: Because these underwear won’t sniff themselves}

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