New cloth self-cleans by killing bacteria

Tossing clothes into the wash when dirty is so last year, thanks to a discovery by chemists out of the University of California at Davis. Near-ordinary cotton may simply need be exposed to light to get busy killing bacteria and breaking down toxic chemicals such as pesticide residues.

Ning Liu, a doctoral student at UC Davis, worked with textile chemists Gang Sun and Jing Zhu to develop a method that incorporates a compound (2-AQC) into cotton fabrics. When exposed to light, it produces reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide that kill bacteria and break down toxins.

While Liu says 2-AQC is more expensive than other compounds, it is difficult to remove from cotton due to strong bonding, and cheaper equivalents should work, too.

"The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing, and farm workers, as well as military personnel," she says.

The team reported on its findings in the Journal of Materials Chemistry last month, shortly before another study out of the University of Iowa chronicled the vast presence of even drug-resistant disease-causing bacteria on hospital curtains.

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Razer introduces Synapse 2.0

Razer also wants in on the cloud bandwagon with their latest release for gamers and gamers only – if you’re looking to stash all your extra files from your hard drive online, look somewhere else. We’re talking about the Razer Synapse 2.0 which is touted to be the world’s first application for storing your personalized peripheral settings in a cloud environment, so that your gaming settings are always accessible to you just about anywhere and anytime. This is clearly a vast improvement compared to the late 1990s when I carried around my Quake config file on a 3.5? disk so that I need not re-bind all the relevant keys with each new computer I use.

Glad to know that the next iteration of Synapse is an improvement over its predecessor, where that proved to be the world’s first onboard memory feature for gaming peripherals which was introduced half a decade ago. Basically, with version 2.0, you are now able to store gaming macros, key binds, and profiles directly to the cloud – letting you gain full access to your entire repertoire of peripheral hardware settings. Just make sure that there is a decent Internet connection in the vicinity before you are able to harness the power of Synapse 2.0, of course.

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Turn Any Pair of Glasses into a Heads Up Display

Putting vital performance stats where they're always visible, the Sportiiiis adds a simple heads up display to almost any pair of glasses so an athlete doesn't have to glance down at a wrist monitor or smartphone to know if they're keeping pace.

The HUD easily straps to the arm of a pair of glasses, positioning a thin boom just below the wearer's right eye. And instead of using a complicated, cluttered stats display that's projected onto the lens, or even directly into the eye, the Sportiiiis has a simple set of seven colored LEDs that light up and flash to indicate an athlete's performance.

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