It's happened to the best of us: We throw a new cotton shirt into the dryer without thinking, and voilà — we now have a shirt fit for a toddler.
Cotton is susceptible to this kind of laundry blunder in a way that synthetic fibers, like polyester, are not. A large part of this vulnerability comes down to the individual fibers of the cotton clothes, Jillian Goldfarb, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University, told Live Science in an email.
