WE’VE been washing our clothes for millennia. Homer even mentioned the chore in the Odyssey. But it’s always been a puzzle how washing gets the dirt out of clothes so quickly. Now Dutch researchers think they’ve worked it out—and cleaner clothes could be on the way as a result.
Until now, most people thought that the tiny pores that trap dirt particles between the fibres in your clothing were too narrow for soapy water to flow through. The rationale went something like this: when the water wets the walls of a pore the water molecules form a “boundary layer”…
