A team of international researchers led by Cornell fibre scientist Juan Hinestroza have successfully created transistors from cotton fibres that remain flexible enough to be woven into fabrics, leading the way for garments that could one day be more capable than your phone. More »
Wool from Yorkshire in Northern England is so fabulous that bad guys want to counterfeit it, so wool merchants are shooting it up with proprietary DNA to prove it’s the real thing. More »
You’re probably wearing something cotton-y right now. Cotton is fairly annoying to harvest. Mechanisation was a quantum leap for the cotton industry, moving it away from archaic methods used since the days of slavery. This machine is the next step forward. More »
Instead of bending down, turning around and picking a bale of cotton, America’s big industry is more high-tech than you thought. Wired looks at how the fibres are grown, picked, processed and spun into threads… for your threads. [Wired and Flickr]
Long before Gore-Tex or Patagonia’s H2No, people kept the rain off their backs with the most obvious of repellants: oil. It was a trick gleaned from mariners in the 1500s. Sails slicked with grease and oil better navigated nasty storms by beating back water. Between then and now, fabric impregnated with various oils and then waxes have become time-tested water proofers. More »
In the past, diagnosing a baby’s fever involved holding the child close while creating a maternal bond. Now, you can tell from across the room! With fashion!! More »
