Human skin loses a lot of heat. Clothes and fire are some of the most important inventions in our history, but they are still far from perfect. The 'goose-flesh' effect, in which a sudden frightening or frigid circumstance erects the local muscles and makes our skin hair stand on end, traps some insulating air but is feeble compared to the same process in cats, for example. We have to add or remove clothes several times a day, and often have difficulty getting to sleep because bedclothes have fixed heat loss.

So Daedalus is inventing a fabric with a variable insulation capacity. It has a current-carrying wire threading it, and magnetic fibrils wrapped around the wire. When a current flows, all the fibrils become magnetic the same way. They all repel each other, and stand up at right-angles to the wire. When the current ceases, they lie down again.

To minimize problems of power drain, the first product will be an eiderdown for a bed, accessible to the main power supply. Sleeping, that primitive need, often conflicts with the civilized need to stay up late. Furthermore, inflexible inventions such as the futon have made it harder to go to sleep. So our animal needs invite technical help. The DREADCO team's eiderdown has insulation that varies in different places and at different times. When the program is perfected, its user will get to sleep rapidly and stay asleep for longer. The resulting programmed bed might even be arranged to wake the sleeper up suddenly, by cooling at the right time. There may be no need for an alarm clock.

Working on the bed design will tell the team which fabric works best, what minimum current will increase insulation by a given factor, and so on. They will then be able to design simple dresses or trousers carrying their own rechargeable batteries. These should allow a wearer to move between rooms held at differing temperatures, or even to pop outside to the shops for a moment, without having to struggle into a coat.

But variable heat-loss garments pose a serious problem for all fashion designers. Underclothes are perhaps the easiest challenge; they allow considerable freedom for providing insulation. But the fashionable young must create the impression that they have endless body heat to spare. The design and placing of insulation panels in fashionable garments for the young will tax even DREADCO's designers to the limit.