Impossibly thin fabric could cool you down by 16-plus degrees

Asbestos gets into our lungs, winds up poking us, and does a lot of damage on the way out. If it ever gets out. Some fibers can get stuck for years.

It's entirely mechanical. Any strong enough fiber of a similar size and shape will create the same class of problems.

> A heat dome that descended on Portland, Oregon,

> FastCompany is an American company

American companies tend to write for American audiences, especially when the article leads off with a bunch of American anecdotes.

If it was fastcompany.co.uk and it started off writing about how dangerous temperatures were going to be in London, and Liverpool, I would have assumed it was British.

The "intended audience" isn't just "people who can speak this language", and there are plenty of other context clues other than just "it's in English"

It's a very popular publication in the United States and is a US company.

> A huge number of people speak English as a second language.

Yes, and if they're reading native articles, they're most certainly from the context of a small group of countries. It's not those nations' responsibility to make their articles accessible to every other nation simply because English is the most common second-language in the world.

> Usually the notation follows the number, so it's kind of lazy to just say it's written for americans specifically

I'm in France at this moment and haven't lived in the US for over half a decade. I've never once seen a Celsius-based nation put "15c", nor any non-english publication do so. They write for their audiences, the same as American, British, Canadian, etc publications do.

> moreso as a counter to someone saying it's Farenheit instead of Celcius since I also clicked immediately thinking how is that possible.

Correct. The publication is written for Americans and is done so from that context. The scientific paper it is discussing is much more specific, as it should be.

The first clue is the date, which is mm—dd-yyyy, only really used in the US.

Also, while not “from glancing”, the article speaks in the context of heat in US cities.

But yes, the author is likely taking for granted that non-US residents would read the article.

That's hardly true. Even if it was it's not a justification for forcing people to change their common parlance.

Also, if you really want a temperature scale, you'd have it referenced to absolute zero so it's an actual ratio quantity. So, a lot of "scientists" use Kelvin or in some cases Rankine.

> ignoring rest of the world

There's a conversion factor. We don't keep it secret. We're not "ignoring" the rest of the world, we're just operating in a mode that most convenient for us.

>.. spectrally selective hierarchical fabric (SSHF) with emissivity greatly dominant in the atmospheric transmission window through molecular design, minimizing the net heat gain from the surroundings. The SSHF features a high solar spectrum reflectivity of 0.97 owing to strong Mie scattering from the nano-micro hybrid fibrous structure. The SSHF is 2.3°C cooler than a solar-reflecting broadband emitter when placed vertically in simulated outdoor urban scenarios during the day and also has excellent wearable properties.

Forget the idiom and focus on the content itself.

The article is written for an American layman audience. The scientific publication it is discussing uses specific terms, as it should. You would know this if you read passed the headline instead of knee-jerk complaining about "Americans wrong".

> I am pretty sure the team (and subsequently company/companies) behind it is not limiting itself strictly to US market and willingly ignoring rest of the world, when there are countries with much bigger heat issues than US.

FastCompany is an American publication and American company. Their audience is most certainly American. The fact that non-Americans can read it is no more important than French-speaking Americans being able to read Le Monde; a publication that also doesn't bother converting or specifying terms for a non-French audience.

I won't go into specifics because none of them are my story to tell, and I don't have enough inside information to say with certainty anyway, but their research clearly showed it was not just a bunch of hot air, but the economic viability was mixed and often not there. In one case, it was only a marginal improvement over something that was already in high production, and the economies of scale made it so that this slightly better product would initially cost 100x more to produce, and even at moderate scale still 10x. My friend was offered some small amount (IIRC it was like $5,000) by some research firm to buy out the patent. He refused because he felt it was worth a lot more, but AFAIK it never ended up going anywhere. He (like the other cases) was inundated with (often conflicting) advice from a ton of angles, by many people who wanted to profit from the whole thing. It was pretty disheartening to watch. There was another one where a friend of a friend who was a professor discovered a way to improve efficiency in transmissions. They ended up raising substantial money but wanted too much to license out the IP to auto-makers, and the auto-makers walked. They ended up with essentially nothing and shortly afterward an even better CV transmission was discovered/invented, rendering his design obsolete anyway.

Also, such materials are real.