#fibers

New Heat-Regulating Fabric Feels Fluffy Like Cotton — but Doesn't Get Wet

In the cold, the fabric kept a hand wrapped in it much warmer than when wrapped in cotton.

Newswise — Once cotton gets wet, it pulls heat from your body. This is helpful when you’re exercising or outside on a hot day but dangerous in the bitter cold. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Lettershave created an ultralight synthetic fiber material with a cotton-like fluffiness that also repels water. The prototype fabric outperformed regular cotton in both retaining heat in the cold and releasing heat at room temperature.  "Inspired by the fluffy structure of cotton, we created a new material that is ultralight and flexible. It keeps you warm in the cold better than cotton or commercial synthetic insulations, while also prevents you from getting too hot at room temperature,” says Quan Shi, a corresponding author of the study. 

Firefighters face a higher risk of skin cancer, but nano fabrics with tiny, rough fibers can help keep them safer

Wildland firefighters are exposed to a mix of harmful chemicals in the smoke they breathe and the ash and soot that gets on their clothing. Over long assignments fighting fires that can last for days to weeks, those chemicals can be absorbed by their skin. Some of those chemicals are carcinogens. A 2025 study found that firefighters in general had a 58% higher risk of dying from skin cancer than non-firefighters and a 40% higher risk of dying from kidney cancer. Other research specifically on wildland firefighters also found elevated risks of dying from skin cancer. To help wildland firefighters reduce some of these long-term health risks, researchers—including me and my colleagues at the Textile and Apparel Science Laboratory in the Department of Design and Merchandising at Oklahoma State University—are working on new ways to create better protective clothing, starting with the tiniest of fibers in the fabric.

I dont post selfies much but you gotta see it moving

Kyoung Ae Cho: Portfolio Collection Vol. 17

Today we’re highlighting Kyoung Ae Cho, visual artist, professor, and head of UW-Milwaukee’s Fibers program within the School of Art & Design. Born in Onyang, South Korea in 1963, Cho completed her graduate work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has been on the faculty at UWM since 1999. The images here are drawn from the 17th volume of the Portfolio Collection series, edited by Matthew Koumis for Telos Art Publishing out of Winchester, England. Cho’s volume, published in 2003, features a forward by textile artist and head of the fiber arts department at Cranbrook Academy Gerhardt Knodel, and an introduction by poet and scholar H.L. Hix.

Raised in a multi-generational home, Cho was often left in the care of her grandmother while her parents worked. From her grandmother she learned the craft of sewing, and the art of collecting and transforming unassuming objects. Hix concurs with Cho in defining the character of her art as that of a gift:

Gifts embody love and care and attention, enacting the values instilled in Cho by her grandmother: the pursuit of craftsmanship, respect for materials, and an insistence on imbuing the ordinary with singularity, the trivial with gravity, the negligible with meaning.

Cho prioritizes the gathering of materials in respectful conversation with environment and its natural processes. Materials gathered for the highlighted pieces include: wild sage bushes, balsam fir needles, thread, cotton, honey locust stems, beeswax, hair, shells, a found typeset drawer, horsechestnut twigs, and burning bush leaves. Cho weaves or stitches decoration with thread or hair, and with burn marks on wood. She explains:

It brings me a smile whenever I find myself spontaneously organizing pine needles, autumn leaves, twigs, shells, pebbles…because it reminds me that what I am doing now is not much different from what I did as a little girl sitting next to my mom.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Date palm waste yields bio-oil, unlocking energy use for 150 million trees

Researchers have developed a method to extract bio-oil from the surface fiber waste of date palm trees, an abundant, low-cost, and sustainable biomass resource generated by an estimated 150 million date palm trees worldwide. The findings are presented in an article published in the journal ACS Omega. In the study, the researchers examine the conversion-dependent pyrolysis behavior, kinetic analysis, and qualitative composition of bio-oil derived from date palm surface fibers (DPSFs). These fibers are abundantly available as municipal and agricultural biomass wastes from date palm trees in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the research was conducted. The authors report that DPSFs show strong potential as bioenergy feedstock. As a lignocellulosic biomass rich in cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, the fibers are particularly suitable for thermochemical energy conversion processes. The material was analyzed "using thermogravimetric analysis at non-isothermal heating rates of 10–40 °C/min at a temperature range of 20–750 °C."