MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light Carbon nanotubes have peculiar properties. Not only do they have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any known substance they can also absorb the most light, making them the blackest material yet. A pair of academics at MIT in the US discovered this when they decided to grow tiny carbon nanofibres on a slice of aluminium …
How to drive an automotive photographer bonkers
I have similar issues taking photos of black cats - the autofocus just won't. My next camera will have the ability to manually focus, just like we did in the Good Old Days..
(Something to do with the fur absorbing the IR used I suspect)
How on earth did you come to that illogical conclusion?
I mean, being a pretentious prat with delusions of grandeur isn't illegal anywhere in the free world, and that's pretty much the only thing wrong with painting one's auto with the stuff, near as I can tell.
I wouldn't know about motorbikes, but one of the reason I stopped driving mopeds was that everyone drove past as if they never saw me. And I made certain that all the lights worked, added lots of freflex tags, and wor a bright orange vest with reflective stripes.
I don't know about in your country, but in my country we have lights on our cars specifically so they are visible in poor light conditions. Some actually shine forward, and are an aid in seeing other objects to avoid when driving. Most of us don't drive beyond the range of our headlights.
If you are worried about it being parked on the street where you might accidentally walk into it, I seriously doubt that a car like that will ever be parked at night in any location that will inconvenience you, so there's no need to lose any sleep over the concept.
Hypotethically...
It's a rainy evening and you're heading home after slaving for minutes in the server room... And spening 10 hours writing the change logs...
There's no streetlights because it's out in the boondocks somewhere, and you see a solitary red light up ahead, possibly with a orange light blinking to the left of it(Brits: imagine that it's to the right instead)
Probably a motorbike about to turn off up ahead...
You can't really se it because of reflections and of course the lights from oncoming traffic. So you position yourself to the right(or the left if you're a Brit), closer to the edge of the road to give him a decent margin as you slip past...
And SMACK straight into the rightand back corner of the expensive blackpainted car with a broken taillight...
I'm not kidding about this situation. I was so very close to do that once, and that car wasn't even covered in Vantablack, just regular black.
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According to wikipedia, Vantablack will also absorb up to 99.96% of light. And that it is based on carbon nanotubes, and it is exclusively licensed to Anish Kapoor's studio for artistic use.
I don't know, maybe it's effectively a parallel developed Vantablack that doesn't need to be licensed - unless MIT require a license for it?
Well, it was an illuminating article. It always helps to shed light on what research is happening. Think about it: someone reading this could have a light-bulb moment, thinking of an amazing use for this material. E.g. it was a bright spark who salvaged that super glue as Post-It Notes.
How is this different to vantablack, which has been around for years?
As usual, you need to look at the original research article to figure this out, since press-summaries of these things tend to be incomplete or even misleading (and the el Reg is not the worst offender by far - at least they do provide easy links to the original publications!). Quoting from the abstract of the paper:
... CNT–metal hierarchical architectures demonstrate omnidirectional blackbody photoabsorption with the reflectance of 1 × 10–5 over the range from ultraviolet to terahertz region ...
There are two obvious differenced to Vantablack here: to begin with, the reflectance is much lower - it absorbs 99.99% of the incoming light (Vantablack is at 99.96%). Secondly, the absorbtion is broad-band, covering the wavelength range of 10+ micrometers to sub-400 nanometers. This is something Vantablack can't do: it needs to be tuned for a specific spectral range. This second property is particularly interesting, and (without reading the article) likely has to do with the coating incorporating not just the nanotubes, but also the horns and pits formed by etching the surface metal and metal-oxide.
On the other side of the equation is the fact that Vantablack is commercially available, alreary good enough for many purposes, and can be applied to a broader variety of surfaces than the treatment described in the article (if it can really be brought outside of a lab - that remains to be seen).
"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"...
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it....
"Look at this," said Ford, "look at the interior of this ship."...
"It's black," said Ford, "Everything in it is just totally black ..."
..."It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me," said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?"
The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats - which were rudimentary since the only important trip this ship was designed for was supposed to be unmanned - were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black.
"Perhaps whoever designed it had eyes that responded to different wavelengths," offered Trillian.
"Or didn't have much imagination," muttered Arthur.
"Perhaps," said Marvin, "he was feeling very depressed."
Like every frood here, I think of this line every time I read of vantablack or its ilk, but even more I'm genuinely awestruck at how tech-prescient the late and much-lamented DNA really was. In so many different fields of science and tech, some gem of a line from HHGTTG seems to fit perfectly for a cutting-edge development, despite having been penned ~40 years ago.
"Like every frood here ..."
Quite and yet someone decided to DV you and deduct an internet point off you. Your post is surely universally acceptable here. I can see some grammatical errors that are quite acceptable (no worse than mine) and some wandering commas (just like mine, when I get going.)
Someone's heart is black, very black. Could even be 99.97% black.
F... f... f... fff. fff. fact! I ache, therefore I am.
Or in my case: I am, therefore I ache.
Oh look: I appear to be lying at the bottom of a very deep, dark hole. That seems a familiar concept, what does it remind me of? Ahhh. I remember: life.
Perhaps if I lie here and ignore it, it’ll go away again.
Or then again, perhaps not.
To be perfectly frank with myself, if it didn’t go away as a result of me falling fifteen miles through the air and a further mile through solid rock, I’m probably stuck with it for good.
Why don’t I just lie here anyway?
Why don’t I climb out?
Why don’t I just go “zutel-wortle?”
Does it matter?
Even if it does matter, does it matter that it matters?
Zutel-wortle, zutel-wortle, zutel-wortle…
He'll get out in a while, he'll start to enjoy it too much
Perhaps they are tired of the same-old-same-old? I mean, c'mon, we've all read the books. Most of us have probably read them a couple of times, or even many times. (mis)Quoting bloody great chunks of them at every opportunity proves what, exactly? That you are part of some exclusive club? That you are the forefront of wit? Perhaps you think it shows your vast intelligence? Hardly ...
I still want a T shirt that aborbs 99.x% of light...
I'm currently wearing one that says "I'm only wearing black until they make something darker"
yeah awesome coincidence, too. It was simply the next one in my T shirt rotation.
Gold writing on whatever black this one will be called (MIT black?). that'd be AWESOME for sure!
I had an OLED monitor so I could fully enjoy the absolute blackness. Or at least as much as a display covered in something as reflective as glass could be enjoyed. Now if only they could design a nanotube coating that allowed 100% of light in one direction, none in the other, and was 100% non reflective in either direction while preserving carbon's scratch resistance in its diamond form rather than its lack of in its graphite form it would make the ultimate display coating...
> “Someone will find a blacker material"
Done: The blackest material is by definition a black hole, since no light can escape it.
Of course one could argue if a black hole is actually "a material", but I'd tend to say it is, given it's (some form of) matter. Unfortunately the commercial applications of black holes are rather limited.
Done: The blackest material is by definition a black hole, since no light can escape it.
Don't think so. Based on my recollection, black holes really didn't figure into the humor of the film. Lot of crude humor as well as multiple knocks at various sci-fi flicks, but no black holes as I recall. You're probably thinking of the Schwartz, their joke on Star Wars' Force: pretty basic joke until the Dark Helmet fight when they went into Double Entendre territory.
Whilst a black-hole is formed of matter, it is not the structure of the matter that causes it to be so black, but the gravitational effect that matter has on space-time, and light in particular.
Whilst I sympathize with your argument, it simply lacks practical applications in the current market and would most likely be too expensive to keep replacing the planet.
The obvious question—assuming that light is being trapped, internally reflected and ultimately turned to heat— seems to be: could this be the basis of an efficient solar heating system? No doubt it's so obvious that everyone and his penguin has thought of it. I'm a little intrigued by the notion of black-faced capillary tubes turning incident solar radiation directly into hot liquid, self-circulating through a baby turbogenerator for useful power ... but I wonder what the use case would be compared with the big, typically desert-based solar furnace systems that concentrate acres of sunlight into a boiler. Perhaps too niche and small-scale?
"will be able to properly engineer the ultimate black.”
'Ultimate' black depends how you define the frequency range you are measuring. Even if you can get it to reflect zero visible light, it's still going to emit infra-red (or longer waves if it's really chilled) since it's not at absolute zero.
" An object that absorbs all radiation falling on it, at all wavelengths, is called a black body. When a black body is at a uniform temperature, its emission has a characteristic frequency distribution that depends on the temperature. Its emission is called black-body radiation. "
Christoph appears to be correct here.
as "the inside of a coffin on a moonless night"?
Beverly Hills Ninja (1997)
"The blackness of my belt is like the inside of a coffin on a moonless night."
Sadly, couldn't find it on YouTube. It predates the public internet a tad.
I recall the 'Black to School' adverts of a regional shoe seller, selling black sneakers/joggers/trainers for schoolwear and featuring a slightly (ie: not over-done to the point of stupid) goth-looking kid in a shoe store being presented with a range of colourful shoes and saying in a very flat voice after each pair...
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
"Got any black?"
....
Finally when presented with the desired completely-black-coloured running shoes, asks:
"Got any blacker?"
30+ years later, His wish has been granted.
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