Believe it or not, an ordinary cotton T-shirt could be converted into a flexible full-body armour which will protect not only from bullets but also from radioactive materials.
A team led by researchers at the University of South Carolina have turned cotton T-shirts into a tough lightweight fabric of boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks, that could lead to more comfortable body armour.
To create the material, they combined the carbon in the cotton with boron and said it could even be used to produce lightweight and fuel efficient cars and aircraft.
"The current boron carbide armour is strong, but its not flexible and it is very heavy," said co-author Xiaodong Li.
"We tried to solve this problem but with a different approach. In our approach, we used cotton T-shirts," Li wrote in the journal Advanced Materials.
Boron carbide is the third hardest material on earth, after diamond and another boron-based material. In bulletproof vests and tanks, thick, heavy ceramic plates of dark grey boron carbide protect soldiers and police.
The team took cotton T-shirts and cut them into thin strips and dipped those white cotton strips into a black solution of boron.
After an hour, the strips were removed from the solution and baked in at oven at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius for an hour. The heat stripped away anything that wasn't carbon or boron and combined these two elements into boron carbide, the study said.
The resulting fabric is very different than the original materials that at the start of the process. It's lighter, stronger, tougher and stiffer than the original cotton, but it can still be bent, unlike normal boron carbide armour plates.
The physical properties of the new fabric are still being tested, said Li, but "from our preliminary results we can say the test have been very, very promising."
"We expect that the nanowires can capture a bullet," said Li.
The former T-shirt can also block other hazards as well, such as cancer-causing ultraviolet light from the sun and even life-threatening neutrons emitted by decaying radioactive materials, said Li.
Body armour is just one potential application of the new research. Covering cars or aircraft with cotton-based boron carbide, instead of the metal used today, would make these vehicles significantly lighter and more fuel efficient.
