Imagine a shirt that makes you cooler than regular clothes, without batteries, chemicals, or plastic. That’s precisely what a team of researchers from Tsinghua University did with a new kind of silk fabric engineered at the nanoscale.
According to a study, ‘Sustainable all-silk textiles for personal thermal management,’ published in Nature Sustainability by Xun-En Wu, Yingying Zhang, and colleagues, the researchers have developed a silk nanotextile, or SilkNT, made entirely of silk, without synthetic polymers or toxic additives. In lab tests, skin covered with SilkNT was 4.3°C cooler than skin covered with traditional silk fabric. Maintaining that kind of temperature difference passively through a hot day would be meaningful for anyone who spends time outdoors in summer.
