Washing a garment after just one of two wears is a drag, and it uses a lot of water. Laundering clothes accounts for 22 percent of the water used in a typical residential home. So over the past few years scientists have been looking for a way to make clothes that wash themselves, especially by coating the fabric with nanoparticles. These coated fabrics could also be used in industrial processes to separate oil and water, to detect the presence of different, important, or dangerous gases, or even to ward off bacteria in hospital garments. Now researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have created a nanoparticle coating that quickly eliminates dirt or stains when exposed to visible light. A study of the researchers' work is published today in an issue of Advanced Materials Interfaces.