What if detecting urban pollution [2] was as easy as looking down at your neighbor's chest? It is--if your neighbor is wearing one of the high-tech sweatshirts designed by NYU grad students Sue Ngo and Nien Lam [3]. The shirts, designed for a class on wearable technologies, feature internal organs that change colors depending on the levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere (hat tip: NY Daily News [4]).

Lam and Ngo's shirts use tiny carbon-monoxide detectors to detect pollutants. When the detectors sniff out pollutants, a microcontroller sends electrical currents through the shirts, heating up wires that run under the internal organs (lungs or heart, depending on the shirt).

The shirts are made of thermochromic fabric [5]that change color as the temperature changes. In this video, Ngo and Lam laser-cut organs out of the fabric:

And below, the finished product:

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter [6] or by email [7].