Battleangel

I really cherish those days when I can simply take an hour or two and immerse myself into the world of National Geographic Magazine. Ahh, the places you should see in your lifetime but most likely will not. The fascinating people. The elusive flora and fauna. It’s not common that I find the peace of mind to just sit down and waste a couple of hours like this … but it feels great, like you actually did something worthwhile for once.

Dream Weavers
Anyway, while browsing through last months issue (0301) I came across the Dream Weaver story. While the story of the Chinese Great Wall(s) was one of the better travel reports in quite a while and also deserves a mention, the story about “Dream Weavers” really caught my interest.
Really witty title if I may say so. “Dream weavers” that is. Basically, the article dealt with the next generation of textiles. We’ve all read bits and pieces before but what NGM did was to travel around the world in search for the future. A future that, as one of the interviewed researchers essentially put it, “will knock your socks off”. Incidentally, this particular scientist was employed by DuPont corporation (the inventors of Nylon, the first mass-produced synthetic fabric).
At the moment most of the fabrics are on a drawing board design level only so as you can imagine no one dared show off anything solid for the NGM staff. That is, I imagine, why they ended up naming the story the way they did.

A few examples of what was touched upon in the article …

• CL (Cargo Lifters), i.e. modern helium filled blimps / zeppelins made out of new super thin fabrics, that could easily move as much as 500 tons at a time.

• Spider silk protein has always been fascinating concept. Right under our noses we have these hairy little crawlers that can produce webbing that is several times as durable as steel. And all from the same 20 amino acids as every other organism on this planet. So wouldn’t it be great if you could harness this production principle? Interestingly, the biotech company behind the idea never managed to used spider because they cannibalized each other. Instead they had a batch of transgenic goats on standby. Hopefully they would produce this protein from their mammary glands so that it could be harvested from the milk. Pretty nifty indeed.
  This also leads up to the concept of spray painting clothes to fit the wearer. Very much like spiders themselves discharge the protein.

• Wearable electronics. Mp3 players disguised as T-shirts. That kind of thing. While it seems easy enough to sew in, this is on an entirely different level. Batteries for example would have to be super thin and part of the fabric itself.
• Health monitoring equipment. Having clothes that could monitor every part of your physiology just as well as any trip to the hospital would be handy.
• Fabrics that change their characteristics depending on their environment, i.e. temperature, humidity or light. Stuff that easily dissolves in boiling water for example. Imagine how that would change recycling. Or a light weight car chassis that can change color.
• Applications for War (or a VERY active life style ;)). Built in GPS transmitters so that the movement of soldiers can be tracked. Suits that absorb, refract or mimic the surroundings in order to make the wearer harder to position. Super wet suits with molecular sized cells that can close if in contact with water but open and let the wearer function normally on land. Not to forget better environmental suits that can withstand anything we or nature throw at them.
• Stronger and lighter building materials. Like the air beam / girder / arch that could really change the way we think of architecture. All in all it could really give metallurgy a run for its money. Basically any use of bulky steel constructions could be replaced with a lightweight equivalent that isn’t mined but rather grown xor constructed on a molecular level. One example that was brought up was the idea of “space tethers” (i.e. pulling cargo into orbit). Possibly made up of the spider protein mentioned above.

The idea of future fabrics is really very simple. Just think of the paradigm with a piece of coal and a diamond. It’s not just about what chemical elements make up a material but also how they bind and what kind of structures they form. Go pick up the January issue to read the story!

And if you want to know more about clothes that monitor your health TODAY you might want to take a look at VivoMetrics. Not all that advanced but FDA approved