Women often wear high heels to make their feet look slender and beautiful. However, wearing high heels puts more strain on the lower legs than walking barefoot. Our goal is to develop pantyhose that reduce leg muscle fatigue when wearing high heels. Wearing high heels usually puts extra strain on our legs. We created comfortable pantyhose; participants walked in them and obtained myoelectric potentials like those obtained when walking barefoot. To understand the reason for this, we investigated the 2D images at the sagittal plane of changes in pelvic tilt, as well as changes in the position of the head and shoulders, when wearing shoes or pantyhose. We focused on the angle between the line from the anterior inferior iliac spine to the iliac crest and the floor, which angle increased; rotated forward (decreased; rotated backward), the upper body axis bending forward (backward). With normal pantyhose, the higher the heel, the further the pelvis rotated backwards against the floor, leaning backwards and keeping the head and shoulders apart to maintain balance. Wearing high heels tilts the upper body backwards. Our specially designed pantyhose with added parts increased clothing pressure, which rotates the pelvis forward. This counteracts the rotation of the pelvis and keeps the position of the heavy head and shoulders closer to the center axis of the body. When wearing our pantyhose, the effect of head and shoulder alignment that occurs when wearing high heels is eliminated. This is thought to be the reason why the use of the muscles in the legs and abdomen was similar when the naked feet and when wearing our pantyhose with high heels. In this way, normal pantyhose is sufficient for low heels, but our pantyhose, which has partial compression processing on the panty area, can be said to be suitable for high heels.

Cellulose nanowhiskers (CNWs) having surface mercapto groups were prepared by surface carboxylation of CNWs and subsequent grafting of 2-aminoethanethiol. The obtained thiolated CNWs (SH-CNWs) were spun into fibers by wet spinning, followed by a post-oxidation treatment with hydrogen peroxide to generate disulfide linkages working as crosslinks between SH-CNWs. Optimizations of several spinning conditions, including types of coagulation and oxidation baths, oxidation times, amounts of hydrogen peroxide used as an oxidant, were examined for higher mechanical properties of the fibers. The optimum conditions, namely a coagulation bath of tetrahydrofuran, 10 minutes of oxidation, and oxidation bath of dimethylsulfoxide, gave highest mechanical properties such as Young’s modulus of 10.1 GPa and stress at break of 61.6 MPa, higher than those of the uncrosslinked SH-CNW fibers.

This study aimed to clarify the mechanism underlying the sustained release of aroma by cellulose nano fiber (CNF) addition. The time-dependent emission of an aroma component (D-Limonene) from the sample surface was measured using a small chamber method, and the emission rate coefficient (k₂) was calculated. Additionally, the stability of the prepared emulsions was evaluated using a spectrophotometer. The obtained data were used to examine the trend in the relationship between the emission factor of the aroma component and the emulsion stability. Furthermore, since the emulsion stability of the CNF-containing samples was presumed to result from the formation of a three-dimensional network and Pickering emulsions, structural observations were conducted using Cryo-SEM and confocal laser microscopy. As a result, the samples containing CNF exhibited more stable emulsions and a slower aroma release compared with those without CNF. Furthermore, examination of the concentration dependence of CNF revealed that emulsion stability and the aroma emission factor varied with the CNF addition level. These findings suggest that the sustained release mechanism of aroma is associated with the emulsion-stabilizing mechanism of CNF. This mechanism may be related to the CNF-induced formation of a three-dimensional network and Pickering emulsions, both of which could contribute to the release mechanism.