New clothes stab bugs with molecular daggers
Tiny molecular daggers that latch onto fibres stab and destroy microbes have been created, meaning “killer clothes” may soon be available. Anti-fungal socks could take on athlete’s foot while, on a more serious note, military uniforms could kill anthrax.
For some inexplicible reason while I was reading this, I was reminded of a passage in The Diamond Age after Fiona jumps off the boat while she and her father are on the way to London.
The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing – countless mites linked elbow to elbow in a two-dimensional array – went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices. Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and now fell about her in a cape of fire.
There’s something intrinsicly cool about the idea of smart clothing – not in the standard “embed a computer in the fabric” sense, but in the Diamond Age passive nanotech sense. Let’s face it, if you need a computer with you at all times, get a PDA or a Hiptop or whatever. But smart clothing – clothes that wouldn’t stick or stain or stay wet or fade – that would get me to go replace my entire wardrobe immediately.
“Although,” thinks the guy who realizes the irony in his wearing four year old cargo pants and an Orbital t-shirt, “that’s not saying much.”