New Fabric Warms or Cools Depending How You Wear It

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know about the battle of the thermostat. This futile clash costs quite a bit of energy: some 12 percent of the United States’ total energy consumption goes to regulating building temperature with air conditioning. Now, a new fabric could end that war and save energy at the same time. The textile, described Friday in the journal Science Advances, offers wearers dual heating and cooling, allowing individuals to control their personal temperature. “Our human body loses heat,” says Yi Cui, a materials engineer at Stanford University who holds a doctorate in chemistry. “If we can control this radiation loss in the summer time, letting the heat go as fast as it can, we would be able to save energy in cooling. In the winter time, we want to slow down this heat loss, keeping this radiation in the human body so we can ...