Climate change and health hazards
Global temperature rise is an established reality and, in this context, cases of death and illness directly attributable to excess heat are growing, as are the distress and discomfort suffered by an ever greater number of people.
According to a recent study conducted by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, in 2025 climate change was responsible for around 16,500 additional deaths across 854 European cities kept under observation, with the elderly population hit especially hard (people 65 or older accounted for 85% of the estimated deaths).
A new hi-tech textile to cool the skin
In this situation, the search for solutions to help counter these increasingly unbearable temperatures is ceaseless, and it is beginning to render some interesting results. One worth noting, as reported in the scientific journal Nano Research, is a new type of textile developed by researchers from the STEM and Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia, one of the areas most plagued by heatwaves and fires, in partnership with their colleagues from the National Engineering Research Center for Advanced Polymer Processing Technology at Zhengzhou University in China.
An intelligent and sustainable textile
The new material is capable of “cooling” the skin because it retains much less heat and moisture compared to cotton and other fabrics. To produce it, the researchers used two components: polylactic acid, or PLA, also used in bio-plastics (and in this case used as a fabric base material), and nanometric particles (measurable in millionths of a millimetre) of boron nitride assembled into incredibly thin sheets (BNNS) that promote breathability.
The result is an extremely lightweight, light-coloured textile produced via electrospinning (making it relatively easy to manufacture on an industrial scale) that reflects up to 96% of sunlight in outdoor environments and has breathability five times higher than that of natural cotton. “Our goal,” explains professor Jun Ma of the Future Industries Institute, “was to design a smart and sustainable textile that could passively regulate body temperature, not using energy, but by exploiting natural physical processes. The combination of high reflectance (the ability to reflect the sun’s rays, Ed.) and moisture control means that the person wearing it feels noticeably cooler and drier.”
In field tests, the measured skin temperature under direct sunlight dropped by an average of 2 degrees Celsius compared to the skin not covered by the fabric, while the reduction at night was up to 3.8 degrees.
Numerous possible applications
A textile that can cool the skin has a broad scope of application, at least from a theoretical standpoint. It can be very helpful to the elderly, naturally, but also to people working outdoors and engaging in athletic training.
If further studies confirm the material’s performance, production could be launched quickly thanks to electrospinning, a process usually not used for textiles, but that is very widespread in industry, in the manufacturing of advanced filters, technical biomedical materials and more, at a relatively low cost.
