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Are you a messy eater? Is ketchup for whatever reason incredibly attracted to the front of your t-shirts? University of California, Davis is working on a solution that could be designed just for you; a fabric that kills bacteria and breaks down compounds for all your fashion needs.
“The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing and farmworkers, as well as military personnel,” said Ning Liu, who conducted the work as a doctoral student in Professor Gang Sun’s group in the UC Davis Division of Textiles and Clothing.
Liu developed a method to incorporate a compound known as 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid, or 2-AQC, into cotton fabrics. This chemical bonds strongly to the cellulose in cotton, making it difficult to wash off, unlike current self-cleaning agents. Unlike some other experimental agents that have been applied to cotton, it does not affect the properties of the fabric.
When exposed to light, 2-AQC produces so-called reactive oxygen species, such as hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide, which kill bacteria and break down organic compounds such as pesticides and other toxins.
You might remember Amy Rawson as the creator of the felted Cthulhu Santas we feature during the holidays. Her latest project is the Pee Towel, which arose from her day job as a lab tech. Specifically, from urinalysis.
Part of urinalysis is a microscopic examination, and one of the microscopic elements we look for is crystal formation. Urinary crystals result from a supersaturation of the urine with some particular substance. That substance can precipitate out to form distinctive crystals.
One kind of crystal inspired Rawson to design a fabric featuring her drawings of calcium oxalate, from which she made kitchens towels called Pee Towels! You can get yours in her Etsy shop. Read more about urinalysis and the creativity it inspires at Rawson’s new website. Link
The largest piece of cloth ever made from spider silk measures four feet wide and eleven feet long. To make it, 70 people collected golden orb spiders over four years! The spiders were then hooked up to a machine that extracted the silk from the spiders without harming them, in a project headed by Nicholas Godley and textile expert Simon Peers.
To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”
By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.
Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”
The resulting cloth is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Link
I don’t know what more I can say about this place that isn’t in the absurdly long name. I will say this quote from the site is awesome:
“While our artists make every effort to insure accuracy, we cannot accept responsibility for the consequences of using fabric brain art as a guide for functional magnetic resonance imaging, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, neurosurgery, or single-neuron recording.”
