A team of material scientists led by Po-Chun Hsu at Stanford University developed a plastic fabric that can keep your skin cool. Roughly four degrees Fahrenheit cooler than under plain cotton. It's hyper-breathable for both water vapor and infrared radiation, the harmless energy your body lets off as heat, which means the fabric allows your body to discharge heat almost as if you were wearing nothing at all. The logic behind this textile: If you can cool the person rather than the building where they work or live, that will save energy. Developing the new material with cooling properties could make an enormous difference in indoor cooling. Turning down the AC two to seven degrees could conserve up to 45 percent more energy, depending on the cooling system and building. The new fabric like the opposite of a space blanket. Often used for first aid, space blankets are thin but can warm you up rapidly by stopping two types of heat loss. Hsu's fabric, meanwhile, is the opposite in that it doesn't stop either of those naturally cooling methods. Like cotton, the new fabric breathes. It allows water vapor to easily squeeze through the material's many pores. What's new is that the material also lets 96 percent of infrared radiation travel through it unhindered. That's because the material is made from the very plastic we use as cling-wrap in the kitchen and has a molecular structure that allows infrared radiation to zip through, just like like light through glass. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/design/news/a22666/t-shirt-supermaterial/
