Typically, when you go clothes shopping, you see fabrics that are … well, kind of predictable.

Cotton. Wool.

Polyester. But imagine picking up a shirt  that said “100% pineapple.” Or a jacket that brags “Made from seaweed.” That’s not some sort of alternate universe, it’s maybe just a few years in the future. Thanks to some seriously cool science, new fabrics inspired by  nature are hitting the market.

Materials that aren’t just fashionable, but also functional, sustainable,  and a bit science fiction-y. So let's check out some of the  strangest and coolest materials   you might be wearing soon. [SciShow intro] Maybe, if you’re feeling fancy, crocodiles. But there’s also a way to make  leather from pineapples and mushrooms.

Your controversial pizza toppings, made … leather! Let’s start with pineapple leather, often known by its trade name, Piñatex, which sounds like something you’d  order at a tiki bar but is wearable. It’s made from pineapple leaves, which are usually tossed out  after harvesting the fruit.

However, pineapple fibers  have a high specific strength, meaning they are very strong for their size, making them an ideal starting  material for textiles. It comes from all the cellulose in there. And when manufacturers of this material are done, the leftover plant materials can go  right back to the soil as fertilizer.

So, one day, you could be  rocking pineapple leather boots  while helping pineapples grow. Fashion and farming. But pineapples aren’t the only fabric like this.

There’s also mushroom leather, which comes from the network of microscopic  threads called hyphae that fungi produce. The hyphae are treated to make  the bonds between them stronger, giving the final material more durability. This involves crosslinking  filaments to stiffen everything up.

After some additional coloring and shaping, these fungal mats mimic the texture of leather. And since fungi are masters of  breaking down organic waste, they can be grown on waste from  other industries, like sawdust.   Upcycling waste into something luxurious while avoiding animal use  sounds like a major win-win. And if you really want the  classic leather from cows, but don’t want to actually be involved  in the harvesting of real cow skin, there may be a solution for that too.

Scientists are developing lab-grown leather! They’re taking cells from cows  and growing them into sheets  that can be tanned to resemble traditional hides. This process is still in its infancy, but you may be able to have a  lab grown wallet soon enough.   And if leather’s not your vibe, don’t worry.

This next material is more  about function than fashion. Seaweed is good for more than  just rolling sushi rolls. It can be made into comfy  clothes that are fireproof!

Or at least, more fireproof  than a lot of other materials. To make these fibers, one company is  harvesting seaweed from Icelandic fjords. They trim the tops and leave the rest  to regrow, like a seaweed haircut.

Once the seaweed is harvested, it’s processed  into a pulp and combined with cellulose from wood. Then, like extruding spaghetti, the pulp is forced through a machine with tiny  holes that shape the pulp into long fibers. These fibers can be used just  like yarn to make fabrics.

But seaweed is way cooler than yarn. Seaweed fibers that contain a compound called  carrageenan are naturally flame resistant. Carrageenan contains sulfur, which plays  an important role in fire inhibition.

As the carrageenan fibers start to burn, sulfur-based free radicals are created. Typically, free-radicals are  thought of as being a bad thing, but in this case, the sulfur  free-radical might reduce other, fire provoking free-radicals. In addition to this, when carrageenan fibers are burned, they create a layer of char around the fibers, which helps to prevent heat from building and ultimately shortens the period of combustion.

Natural flame retardancy is a big win because a lot of the chemicals  that get applied to fabrics  to make them hard to burn are toxic. Plus, seaweed fabrics don’t  need fertilizers or farmland. And according to the company  that makes seaweed fabric, it’s biodegradable and produced  in a closed-loop system, meaning no toxic waste gets left behind.

While seaweed can help your clothes fight fire, another futuristic fabric takes on ice. And for that, we need to look to  the ultimate sub-zero survivalist, the polar bear. But before I tell you more about that, a quick ad.

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To check them out, visit brilliant.org/scishow, scan the QR code onscreen, or click on the link in the video description. You can try Brilliant for free and get  20% off an annual premium subscription. Polar bears are the masters  of warm winter fashion.

Their fur is extremely warm and  good at preventing ice formation. For polar bears, this is useful for  frequent dips into freezing cold water. And for us, these properties could combine to make the ultimate ski jacket.

Polar bear fur is a good insulator  because of its unique design. Each polar bear hair has a porous core, surrounded by an outer, protective shell. The empty spaces in the porous  core are not truly empty, but filled with air.

And air is a bad conductor of heat, so each of these tiny hairs uses  this trapped air as a barrier to keep the polar bear’s  body heat from leaching out into their freezing cold environment. But we’re not encouraging the  use of actual polar bear fur  to make ski jackets because they are a vulnerable species! Instead, to emulate their fur, scientists have tried making  aerogel-based fibers and fabrics.   Think of an aerogel like  if you were to make jello, but after the jello has hardened into shape, ou remove all of the water  and replace it with air.

This would leave behind a structured  matrix that is mostly air,  which functions as a great insulator. But the problem with most aerogels   is that they’re fragile and can’t be woven into fabrics. So researchers from Zhejiang University in China drew on the design of polar bear  hair to make a more durable version.

Inspired by the shell of the polar bear hair, they added a protective coating to  the aerogel, making it stronger. They were able to turn this into a  very warm, one-of-a-kind sweater, as warm as a down jacket, with no feathers, and no actual polar bear fur, in sight. And if you’re less worried about the  cold and more worried about slushy ice, polar bears have a solution for this too!

Their fur’s anti-icing properties come from sebum: the oily secretion that your skin produces to help keep it dry and  protected from the elements. Polar bear sebum is a bit different than ours. A group of scientists working  in places that get pretty cold, like Norway and the UK, have  studied its chemical composition,   and have identified two specific compounds as the ones that produce this anti-icing property.

Why these particular compounds are so  good at the task isn’t totally clear, but the findings set the  stage for further exploration. And in the meantime, these two  compounds could be produced in a lab and applied to other fabrics to make  them better at repelling ice and water. Many of the chemicals used today for  anti-icing belong to a group called PFAS, which are being linked more  and more to health issues.

So an alternative inspired by  polar bear fur is extremely cool. But they’re not the only living thing with a remarkable outer layer  that has led to a new fabric. Lotus plants emerge completely  clean from murky, dirty water.

This is, in part, thanks to a wax coating that  prevents water from clinging to them. But the leaves are also covered in tiny, microscopic bumps that enhance this effect, causing water and dirt to bead up and  roll off like marbles on a smooth surface. This makes lotus leaves self-cleaning, because whenever it rains, the water collects any dirt or debris that  might be on the leaf and carries it away.

Researchers at the University of  Zurich in Switzerland took notice and replicated this effect by coating a fabric with tiny silicone polymer nanofilaments. And in their experiments, water  slid right off the fabric. In fact, when they submerged clothing  coated with these nanofilaments underwater for two months, it was completely dry when  they removed the fabric!

Imagine dropping your sweater  in a puddle, pulling it out, and putting it on like nothing  happened. It’s not magic. Just lotus leaf technology.

And if self-cleaning clothes  aren’t enough for you, there’s also a self-healing fabric on the horizon. Have you ever stretched out a  favorite sweater to the point where the thing is basically unwearable? Well, scientists are trying to solve that problem with a little help from an unlikely  ocean collaborator: the mussel.

They’re not the muscles that help us lift weights, but they’re still pretty strong when  they cling to rocks for dear life. They use byssal fibers, which are durable, flexible threads that can heal  themselves when stretched. These fibers, often called silk, can be cut off of the mussels,  washed, combed, and spun into fabric.

The fibers are made of proteins, parts of which are tightly  packed together but can stretch, kind of like a slinky. And their self-healing superpowers come from a bunch of metal  ions throughout the fibers. These metal ions form temporary bonds with charged amino acids in the proteins, holding everything in place.

When the fibers stretch, these  bonds break and the proteins unfold. The cool part is that the proteins tend to  return to their original, compressed state, so the bonds eventually reform  and pull the fibers back together, compressing that slinky back  into its original shape. Imagine having clothes that can do that!

Although we’re not quite there yet, researchers are hard at work designing  and testing materials that can self-heal, using the same protein-metal  interactions found in the mussels. These fabrics might sound futuristic, but some of them are already here. You can buy mushroom leather handbags  and seaweed-fiber shirts today.

Some of them are still luxury  products with high price tags, but as the technology gets better and cheaper, we might see a world where pineapple  boots with the polar bear fur are as normal as cow leather boots. Nature has given us a whole  catalog of materials to work with, so who knows what we'll be wearing next. [ OUTRO MUSIC ]