Self-cleaning clothes are here. Cries of “Victory!” come from the World Mud Pie Consortium

If you leave your new, chemically-enhanced, cotton t-shirt out to dry in the sun, now you won’t need soap and water to get it clean. Chinese engineers combined titanium dioxide and nitrogen to help self-wash your cotton clothes. Sound like a bomb? No, it’s your future clothes!.

They say stains and odors disappear after being exposed to sunlight. Treated clothes were tested by dousing them with orange dye. After two hours in the sun, engineers claim that 71% of the stain had been removed. And it’s not just a one-time deal. Repeated sun “washings” yielded the same response.

So what have we learned here? Mostly that, in the future, we’ll all be wearing slightly dirty cotton clothes that may or may not be made out of bomb-making materials.