A golden opportunity
This week's Unlimited Magazine, features an article by Emma Rawson about Professor Jim Johnston's research with Dr Kerstin Lucas into the use of gold and silver nanoparticles as colourants for wool and other fibres. An excerpt from the article features below, to read the piece in full click here.
Eight years ago Professor Jim Johnston, a chemistry academic at Victoria University, achieved what the ancient Greeks had only dreamed of – combining wool fibres with pure gold using nanoscience. But this golden wool was much different to that of Jason’s fable, because at nano particle-size gold loses its yellow colour and takes on hues of purple, mauve and grey.
Johnston regarded his purple gold wool as little more than a scientific novelty, until he was bombarded with its commercial potential when doing a presentation for Britain’s Institute of Nanotechnology later that year.
“Quite a lot of the fashion designers came leaping over their chairs after my presentation and said ‘where can we get this technology?’. I had to tell them, ‘it’s only in the test tube at the moment’,” he says.
“Then the World Gold Council somehow picked up on these proceedings and they sent me an email saying ‘we are interested in this and we’d like to give you some money to develop this technology’.”
Follow the link to read more about Prof. Johnston's New Materials and Technologies research group.