Plans are now proceeding to commercialise a revolutionary liquid laundry additive called ‘CatClo’, which contains microscopic pollution-eating particles. The new additive is the result of collaboration between the University of Sheffield and London College of Fashion, with initial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Items of clothing only need to be washed in the additive once, as the nanoparticles of titanium dioxide grip onto fabrics very tightly. When the particles then come into contact with nitrogen oxides in the air, they react with these pollutants and oxidise them in the fabric. The nitrogen oxides treated in this way are completely odourless and colourless and pose no pollution hazard as they are removed harmlessly when the item of clothing is next washed, if they haven’t already been dissipated harmlessly in sweat. The additive itself is also completely harmless and the nanoparticles are unnoticeable from the wearer’s point of view.

One person wearing clothes treated with CatClo would be able to remove around 5g of nitrogen oxides from the air in the course of an average day – roughly equivalent to the amount produced each day by the average family car. Professor Tony Ryan OBE of the University of Sheffield, who has co-led the project working closely with Professor Helen Storey MBE from London College of Fashion, says: “It’s the action of daylight on the nanoparticles that makes them function in this way. The development of the additive is just one of the advances we’re making in the field of photocatalytic materials – materials that, in the presence of light, catalyse chemical reactions. Through CatClo, we aim to turn clothes into a catalytic surface to purify air.”

http://www.catalytic-clothing.com/

Bryan Wei, Mingjie Dai, Peng Yin: Complex shapes self-assembled from single-stranded DNA tiles, In: Nature, Vol. 485, No. 7400, Pages 623-626, May 31 2012, DOI:10.1038/nature11075: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11075

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a new kind of barcode that could come in an almost limitless array of styles – with the potential to enable scientists to gather vastly more vital information, at one given time, than ever before.

The method harnesses the natural ability of DNA to self-assemble.

Image: Shown here are the color combinations (216) resulting from attaching just three colors to a DNA nanotube using origami technology – underscoring the potential of this new method. © Chenxiang Lin, Ralf Jungmann, Andrew M. Leifer, Chao Li, Daniel Levner, George M. Church, William M. Shih, Peng Yin, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School