According to the National Park Service, washing machines are bad for our planet, so bad in fact that they can use up to 41 gallons of water per load. That’s not ideal given the prevalence of droughts as climate change intensifies its work to wipe humanity from the face of the planet. That’s why Bosch, the German multinational which makes, uh, pretty much everything, has created FreshUp. It’s a tool designed to “refresh” your clothes without the need to dump them into your washing machine.

The idea is to remove odors from clothes that are otherwise clean, in the sense that they’re not visibly stained. You know, an evening gown or tuxedo that looks a million dollars but smells like the bottom of a well-visited ashtray, or that t-shirt that goes perfectly with your outfit, but smells a little bit sweaty. In those situations, you’d grab this doodad, rub it over the required garment and step out smelling fresh as a daisy.

FreshUp is a lozenge-shaped device measuring 6.5-inches long, with a 2-inch treatment area on its underside. Once charged and turned on, you press this against your dry clothes so that the process of breaking down the smell can begin. It works as an ionizer, creating a plasma which Bosch says dissolves the connections between odor molecules.

There’s a beautiful design on the top that’s designed to resemble an interlacing series of magnetic field lines. This is backlit in white, and turns purple when it’s actually treating your clothes with its ionization. Despite the overall vibe that this is a product that fell out of a Sharper Image catalog twenty years ago, it’s impeccably designed. Thankfully, there are no “but wait, there’s more” innovations to add to the list of jobs this thing can do.

The battery takes around four hours to charge and will give you an hour of processing before it needs to go back on the wire. Bosch also chose a micro USB port for charging rather than USB-C, which is, you know, a choice you can make in 2021. But it’s not ideal if you’re trying to minimize cable clutter and are looking to ditch the older standard as soon as possible.

As soon as you’ve treated a garment with FreshUp, you’ll be acutely aware of the ionization in the air. It offers a similar smell to the taste you get in your mouth when you’ve bitten your tongue. That iron-in-the-blood scent that clings to your hand when you’ve held onto some loose change while waiting for a vending machine. And it doesn’t just sit on your clothes, but hangs in the air, where on very dry summer days you’ll want to make sure you leave your windows open to encourage airflow.

In its sales pitch, Bosch says that FreshUp was designed to eliminate what it describes as a “chair-drobe.” You know, that pile of clothes in your bedroom that maybe you drape over the back of a chair, or stuff on the bottom of your wardrobe, because they’re too clean to wash. I’m not a regular chair-drobe-ist, but the fan housing of my rowing machine is sturdy enough to drape clothes over on the rare occasions they wind up in this state. Bosch adds that, after treatment, “even tough odors such as cigarette smoke and body odor are removed, leaving clothes as if they have been hung outside to dry.”

Daniel Cooper

And here’s where I’ve really earned my wages over the last month or so, because I’ve spent a chunk of this summer sniffing awful things. Not to mention, of course, wearing already-worn clothes and spending way too long with my nose in my own armpit. I’ve been testing a high-intensity exercise bike and trying to be as active as possible, all the while getting my clothes covered in cigarette smoke and frying oil. Consider this a content warning for what is about to follow, as well as a polite request for danger pay.

There were plenty of smells that the FreshUp was able to dispel without breaking much of a sweat, including the cigarette smoke and fried food. It’s in this regard that makes me think that FreshUp is perfect for traveling, when you want to make sure that you’re looking and smelling your best. If your top smells like the inside of an ashtray, just waft this thing over it, hang it up for an hour or two, and boom, you’re away.

But no matter how much I rubbed this thing over the armpits of my well-worn t-shirts (after, I should make clear, the fabric had dried out) I could never banish the smell of my sweat. I tried everything, including leaving a t-shirt hanging up for a day or two and then treating it again, then leaving it to hang for another couple of hours, and nothing. The scent wasn’t eliminated, although I will say that it was moderated somewhat, but not enough to make you not deeply self-conscious about how you smell. But I did wonder if this was a “me” problem rather than Bosch’s, and so grabbed clothes from other family members. One of my relatives who went for a run handed me a pair of their socks which stank so bad that they probably violated chemical weapons laws.

And again, I’d like to reiterate that the time I spent dry-retching was all in the service of good journalism.

Once dried out, I treated those socks and found that, again, FreshUp hadn’t destroyed the smell, but it had reduced the urge to heave. That, broadly speaking, means that this is not going to be your savior if you’re schlepping around in a warm country.

But if you aren’t cursed with the blight of free-flowing underarms (or, in Richard Nixon’s case, upper lip) then I think FreshUp may have a place for you. I can think of some times where, after a long evening on assignment, I’d love to give my clothes an emergency refresh. If you’re doing two or three smart events back-to-back and can’t visit a dry cleaners, then FreshUp is probably a good shout, but the use cases are limited.

But don’t expect the results to be as good as washing, because fundamentally, nothing is going to be able to replace your washing machine just yet. And then there’s the price, which at £250 ($342) is a little high for a device that can’t revolutionize how you do laundry. At least, not yet.

Nintendo's colorful, character-filled island life sim Animal Crossing: New Horizons lends itself to merchandise collabs. On the heels of its Uniqlo and Monopoly crossovers, the game is getting the footwear treatment. Puma is releasing an Animal Crossing collection featuring sneakers and apparel. The company teased the new drop on Twitter with an image featuring both the Puma and Animal Crossing logos. Nintendo subsequently retweeted the teaser with the caption “Something new is on the horizon.” 

It didn't take long for images of the collab to start circulating online. That's the Animal Crossing x PUMA Wild Rider silhouette above via Sneaker Freaker. More sneakers are reportedly on the way. Fan site Animal Crossing World also shared an image of a hoodie from the crossover. The collection is all pastel blues and greens, while the sneakers also add light and dark browns for a nature vibe. 

Puma

It's no wonder Puma is teaming up with the tranquil game for its new range. AnimalCrossing: New Horizons has been a massive hit for Nintendo. It was the third biggest selling game of 2020, according to some estimates, and continues to attract players to this day.

In the past, gaming and fashion tie-ups have been a mixed bag. We'll let you decide whether you'd be seen in Nike's League of Legends range or Adidas and Ninja's sneaker. While Puma has previously dropped a Mario collab and a Sonic clothing line.

First developed more than 100,000 years ago, clothing is one of humanity’s earliest — and most culturally significant — inventions, providing wearers not just protection from the environment and elements but also signifying social status, membership in a community and their role within that group. As robots increasingly move out of labs, off of factory floors and into our everyday lives, a similar garment revolution could soon be upon us once again, according to a new research study out of New York’s Cornell University.

“We believe that robot clothes present an underutilized opportunity for the field of designing interactive systems,” the team argues in What Robots Need From Clothing, which was submitted to the In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. “Clothes can help robots become better robots — by helping them be useful in a new, wider array of contexts, or better adapt and function in the contexts they are already in.”

“I started by looking at how different materials would move on robots and thinking about the readability of that motion — like, what is the robot's intention based on the way materials move on the robot,” Natalie Friedman, a PhD student at Cornell Tech and lead author on the paper, explained to Engadget. “From there, I started thinking about all the different social functions that clothes have for people and how that could influence how the robot is viewed.”

While tomorrow’s robots may wear white button down dress shirts and black bow ties while serving hors d'oeuvres to party guests or wear candy stripes while working as nurses, it’s not simply a matter of tossing human clothing onto a robotic chassis. “What robot clothes are is integrally tied to what robots need from clothing. Robot clothing should analogously fulfill needs robots have, rather than just being human clothes on a robot,” the researchers wrote.

Robo-clothes could take any number of forms, depending on their wearer’s specific function. Robotic firefighters, such as the Thermite from Howe and Howe, might theoretically be issued heat-resistant overcoats akin to what humans wear but embedded with thermochromic ink to provide the robot’s operator an easy visual reference to the area’s ambient temperature or indicate that the robot is in danger of overheating. Conversely, search-and-rescue bots could wear waterproof garments when conducting oceanic operations and then strap on extra-grippy boots when searching for lost hikers in mountainous terrain or survivors of a building collapse.

"I think this work is important to helping engineers and technologists understand the functional importance of aesthetics and signaling in design,” Cornell Tech professor and co-author Wendy Ju, said in a recent blog. “It's not ‘just fashion’ - what the robot wears helps people understand how to interact with it in ways that are critical to safety and task execution."

Overall, the use of swappable attire could lead to more generalized robot designs as the specific capabilities the clothing provides don't have to be baked into the robot’s construction. “It is more difficult to build a new robot than to build new clothes,” Friedman said. “I think that clothes are going to influence robot design and robot designs are going to influence clothes. Maybe it'll start in one direction — clothes made to fit robots — but, in the future, I think that robots might be built to better fit in clothes.” She notes that Pepper, though recently discontinued by SoftBank, offers an online merch store with a wide variety of costumes and outfits for the robot to wear including outfits designating cultural, national, professional and religious affiliations.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

But clothing on robots isn’t just for their own benefit, it also serves to demystify and humanize these cutting-edge machines in the eyes of the people they’re working with. For example, clothing could help protect a robot’s sense of shame — or rather that of its user.

“The need for wire modesty — to cover up nudity — stems from anthropomorphic priggishness, since robots do not get embarrassed about wires poking out of them,” the researchers wrote. “However, both humanoid and non-humanoid robots have pragmatic reasons to maintain a clean and covered aesthetic, because exposed wires present a real risk to function. Any wire that is pulled out or cut will remove power or signal to a subsystem, and that can be risky to the robot and any people or objects in the environment.”

“I definitely see a future where [when robots] aren't wearing clothes, it might look a little funny,” Friedman added. “I mean we are just mapping our ideas onto robots, right? Robots don’t have consciousness, so they don't feel shame.”

However, putting clothes on robots could also prove problematic especially if the apparel style has been culturally appropriated. You can bet your bottom dollar that the first cannabis dispensary to dress an automated budtender in rastafarian garb is going to make headlines — and not the kind that are good for business — same as if you outfitted a Roomba with a Native American headdress. “Hawaiian shirts, for example, used to be a marker of ‘casual Friday’ office attire, but more recently are affiliated with the extremist ‘Boogaloo Boys,’” the researchers wrote.

Despite the potential drawbacks to putting pants on robots, doing so could help make the entire field of research more attractive to a new generation of roboticists. “I like to think about girls in robotics,” Friedman said. “When they're young, I think robotics seems like a really intimidating thing but I see clothes as kind of a way to welcome, you know, the stereotypically feminine... skills that women have. I see clothes as a way to welcome girls into [robotics].”