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Nanotubes Form The Darkest Material Yet Created
toxcspdrmn writes "Bad news for Spinal Tap fans. The BBC reports that researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have produced the darkest known material by manufacturing "forests" of carbon nanotubes. This forms a surface that absorbs or scatters 99.9% of all incidental light."
He will incorporate this new 'blackest' black into Doom 4.
(and you just thought you saw all possible shades of black and brown in Doom 3!)
I can't wait to paint my nerd den with this stuff... light be damned!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I can't wait to get my fuligin cloak!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun/
... can we get a screenshot?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
wouldn't it just be less 'mirror-like' and more matte if it scatters light? In order to be black from all angles, it would have to absorb all the energy. ?
...if anybody had found a picture of it. I'd see this article a few days ago and couldn't turn up anything.
Unfortunately, posting on Slashdot provides me with the perspective to see how stupid a question it was.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."
Just callin' it like I see it.
from 1 to 10 would yield us, what? 11?
If the media release is accurate, a Mr Hotblack Desiato would like a word with them... his current ship isn't quite black enough.
If the light is absorbed 99.9%, where does the energy go? Heat? If so, could this lead down the road to new power sources? Super-black nanotube network produces heat to produce steam to turn turbines... (??)
"We're here to make coffee metal.
We're here to make everything metal.
Blacker than the blackest black times infinity."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23060778-13762,00.html not to be confused with: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134847/
IANAP but I think by being a great absorber, it becomes a great emitter too: Black body. So it may not actually get much hotter than something less black. I guess it depends on where the equilibrium point is, and I don't have any intuition about that.
Case in point - I was once in a room that had contained a fire. The walls, floor, ceiling, and windows were all coated in a soft black soot that was perfectly uniform and ate all the light. The effect was very disconcerting and disorienting. None of the normal visual cues of highlights, textures, or reflections existed. Only the open door gave a reference point so that you didn't feel like you were floating in a void.
The article posits several uses, but can you imagine a person clothed in this black in full sunlight? Could we even see them? or a building covered in it? or a car? Sight requires a least some photons to hit the retina. Anyone? I know I sound repetitive, its 0430 and didn't want to lose the train of thought to sleep.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
How much more is the the Macbook that is this colour going to cost???
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Ninja suits!
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
I always thought it was kinda interesting that a stack of razorblades makes a fair approximation of a blackbody. You can't grow stacks of razorblades on surfaces, natch, but for some applications I imagine you just need a small optical sink and don't want to spend a lot of money. Then again, this could be just trivia more than something that's useful to know.
(Because of the potential for dangerous reflections, please don't shine lasers into a stack of razors trying to test their reflectivity--unless you know what you're doing and, hopefully, have an appropriate pair of laser goggles.)
Why would you want to hide your new Macbook away?
A great use for this would be the border area around my home cinema screen. The projector leaks a bit of light there...
No sig today...
My soul is as black as the darkest carbon nanotube forest!
No.
The "solar constant" is measured "on the outer surface of [the] atmosphere", most certainly NOT at ground level. Down here, you get around 100W/m2, during daylight, in the summer, with no cloud cover, etc.
Did you really think that our previous "blackest" materials were simply so highly reflective as to make such a scheme impossible? No, they absorb something like 95%+ of light. But with that, you simply need a huge area to get a useful amount of energy.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I was thinking along the same lines.
But while his material would undoubtedly be very efficient for absorbing heat, it does not represent any revolution in that area: we can already absorb sunlight for heat with reasonably high efficiency with just basically black paint. This invention is better, by many percentage points, but it is still only an incremental step up from what we can already easily get per square meter.
Also, as always, the economics come into play: it will often be a lot more attractive to use a cheaper and much simpler solution, and spend slightly more surface area to compensate for the lower efficiency.
Extruded black plastic will probably still be hard to beat in the real world for a while.
I think it will be much more useful in light sensitive applications.
sudo ergo sum
Father Ted - Series Three, Episode One
DOUGAL: Anyway, what else did you order?
TED: Priest socks. Really black ones.
DOUGAL: I read somewhere, I think it was in an article about priest socks that priest socks are blacker than any other type of socks.
TED: That's right Dougal. Sometimes you see lay people wear what look like black socks but if you look closely you'll see they're very, very, very, very, very, very, very dark blue.
DOUGAL: Actually that's true. I thought my uncle Tommy was wearing black socks but when I looked at them closely they were just very, very, very, very, very, very, VERY, very, very, very dark blue.
TED: Never buy black socks in a normal shop. They'll shaft you every time!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Where does the energy go?
That to pick up news that is happening 3 miles away from my house. From Slashdot hosted far away linking to the BBC even further away. I am sure most of the RPI students don't know about this yet... (being 7:00 in the morning) Colleges should really publicize their work more. It just could help them get those grants they are looking for.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You are wrong here. The 1366 W/m2 is indeed at the upper atmosphere. Lower in the atmosphere it is less, how much depends on the current state of the atmosphere. About 1000W/m2 is the right value.
The 100W/m2 is the energy output of a not so good photovoltaic module.
Nyh
I wonder what it would cost to do? It would be wicked cool to do this to a bedroom!!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
It just means instead of using cheap carbon black, 99.6% blac, you use expensive and fragile nanotubes, 99.9% black.
Not a significant increase in energy absorption, and not economical either.
One of Pratchett's books talked about "stygium". It was a metal blacker than anything else in the Discworld and would incandescence and melt seconds after exposure to direct sunlight. I don't think this stuff would do that but if the spectrum is wide on this stuff, you could make some nice solar water heaters out of it.
Well, let us do some math on the trivial boiling of water with black containers.
Take a container with 1 kg of water. For ease of calculation we will take a 0.1 m x 0.1 m x 0.1 m container.
Let us assume one side of the container faces the sun. Area is 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01 m2
The staring temperature is 20C, boiling temperature is 100C. Delta t is also 80 C. Specific heat of water is about 4200 J/K/kg.
To make the 1 kg of water boil you need 80 x 4200 = 336 kJ.
Energy received on the side of the container is 0.01 x 1366 = 13.66 W.
Time needed to get 336 kJ with this power is 336000/13.66 = 24597 s (=6 hours and 50 min).
Oops, not so trivial after all...
If you make a large area (1m2) container containing 1 kg water you need get a container of 1 m x 1 m x 0.001 m. This container would boil water in 336000/1366 = 245 s (about 4 min). Problem with such a container is a large area at the cool side of the container and the specific heat of the container is a lot higher than the specific heat of the water it contains. So you need to design a container with a very low specific heat compared to the specific heat of the water it contains, a large surface area to collect the solar energy and good isolation at the shade side to minimize heat losses. Welcome to the interesting world of designing solar collectors.
And for the very black material: going from 99% black to 99.9% black gives only (99.9-99)/99 = 0.9% increase of efficiency. The problem of solar collectors is not the black not being black enough. A new blacker black won't revolutionize solar collectors.
Nyh
For a mention of those you'd have to read the article, grasshopper. ;)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I color sampled the image of this stuff, and its RGB value is #071108. I can make a blacker square in Paint.net and print it out.
Call me back when you reach less than #000000 and I'll be impressed.
And that was the sound of goth and emo kids everywhere having a collective orgasm. Its also justification for my shirt that says "I'm only wearing black until they make something darker"
I always thought "I'm only wearing black until they make something darker" was just a joke. So when can I buy clothes made out of it?
Pure speculation here, but it would make a great material for building a Dyson Sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere AND IF that's the case, there is at least another plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Barack Obama could use this material to finally put an end to the criticism that he isn't "black enough". With this stuff, he could probably put even Shaft to shame.
*shuts his mouth*
8==8 Bones 8==8
Is this what they use for dark fiber to run the Intertubes over?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.