Kicker - Watching paint cool

NICK EICHER, HOST: Maybe you’re still feeling sticker shock from your summer air conditioning bills. If so, researchers at Purdue University may have just the thing!

The world’s most heat-reflective paint.

You need to see this paint, but I recommend only while wearing very dark sunglasses.

This stuff is whiter than white!

Professor Xiulin Ruan told the podcast This is Purdue that the paint was seven years in the making!

RUAN: We started working on this in 2014. We tested many different materials, concentrations, and the different particle sizes and so on.

The team didn’t set out to create the world’s whitest paint.

It just happened as they worked to make their paint more reflective, they found that it made the paint also extremely white.

It reflects 98.1 percent of solar radiation, and that makes it cooler to the touch than surrounding surfaces.

And researchers hope that someday soon it will help you lower your energy usage and your cooling bills.

The aesthetics, though, imagine a neighborhood with nothing but 98.1 percent reflective paint.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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