“If you can cool the person rather than the building where they work or live, that will save energy,” said Cui. The secret comes in a combination of nanotechnology, photonics, and chemistry, which ultimately helps the human body expel heat more efficiently than any other fabric currently on the market. In fact, wearing clothes with this new textile can help keep the wearer 4 degrees cooler — and not only does this revolutionary material help with sweat evaporation, but it also allows “heat that the body emits as infrared radiation to pass through the plastic textile,” Stanford News reports.
“40 to 60 percent of our body heat is dissipated as infrared radiation when we are sitting,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. “But until now there has been little or no research on designing the thermal radiation characteristics of textiles.”
And with concerns about rising global temperatures, it’s about time someone conducted this research.
While this new textile isn’t quite as good as going about your day in the nude, it gets pretty close. “Wearing anything traps some heat and makes the skin warmer,” Fan said. “If dissipating thermal radiation were our only concern, then it would be best to wear nothing.”
But given societal norms and general consideration for our neighbors, we have to turn to the next best thing, which looks to be this new textile.
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