© Shutterstock
Glasses wearers know this. Once the temperatures drop outside, you’re in trouble. When you enter a store or arrive at the office in good spirits, after a few seconds you see nothing more than a blur. Nothing seems to help against those pesky spectacles. But there is hope, because science would have finally found the solution.
Camille van Boembroek
The heroes in this story? Professor Deimos Polikakos and Thomas M. Stuzius from the research institute ETH Zurich. Together with a team of researchers, they went in search of a solution to this common problem and found it. In gold anyway.
Sunlight and gold
Don’t panic, your lenses won’t have to be made entirely of gold in the future. But by embedding nanoparticles of the precious metal into the lenses, scientists have discovered a way to heat the lenses of your eyeglasses by 8 degrees Celsius compared to the ambient temperature. This can be done using the heat of sunlight. Since fogged glass is caused by warm, moist air hitting a cool, smooth surface, raising the temperature of the glasses greatly reduces the risk of fogging.
When the new technology is available to the general public, it’s unclear what the cost will be and whether your glasses will remain free of irritating vapor even without sunlight. Curious about the full search? If you can over here read.
“Total coffee specialist. Hardcore reader. Incurable music scholar. Web guru. Freelance troublemaker. Problem solver. Travel trailblazer.”
More Stories
By Theo Olthuis: “Space gave its soft wings of sound”
There is now a lake in one of the driest places on Earth
Bluetongue spreads partly by animal transmission