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Super-Black Is the New Black (theatlantic.com)
Feathers on birds of paradise contain light-trapping nanotechnology that makes some of the deepest blacks in the world, a new study has found. From a report: Blackbirds, it turns out, aren't actually all that black. Their feathers absorb most of the visible light that hits them, but still reflect between 3 and 5 percent of it. For really black plumage, you need to travel to Papua New Guinea and track down the birds of paradise. Although these birds are best known for their gaudy, kaleidoscopic colors, some species also have profoundly black feathers. The feathers ruthlessly swallow light and, with it, all hints of edge or contour. By analyzing museum specimens, Dakota McCoy, from Harvard University, has discovered exactly how the birds achieving such deep blacks. It's all in their feathers' microscopic structure.
A typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches -- barbules -- sprout from the barbs. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. The super-black feathers of birds of paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers. McCoy and her colleagues, including Teresa Feo from the National Museum of Natural History, showed that this light-trapping nanotechnology can absorb up to 99.95 percent of incoming light.
A typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches -- barbules -- sprout from the barbs. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. The super-black feathers of birds of paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers. McCoy and her colleagues, including Teresa Feo from the National Museum of Natural History, showed that this light-trapping nanotechnology can absorb up to 99.95 percent of incoming light.
actually I wonder if this might count as prior art to open the tech to other manufacturers...
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This sounds to me like a VERY good idea for Stealth Tech... of course the size and material would need to be tailored for the wavelengths involved but it's all EM energy....
Which, for some of us in Northern climates where is gets Really Fucking Cold might find helpful as it diminishes the heat loss between the air/window into the room.
Or some kind of skylight which let you have something underneath which gave radiant heat in the house.
I see lots of applications for being able to translate light into heat. Or at least, places where it would be awfully nice to try. The last few weeks of polar vortex have definitely made some of us acutely aware of what extreme cold really is, and I know I've experienced -40 ... and at that temperature Celcius and Fahrenheit are the same so it doesn't matter where you're from.
On those days, you get bright sunshine which leaves no insulation in the clouds, and freezing temps. So any form of light/heat transformation is welcome.
But, now that you phrase it that way, and having seen a couple of documentaries on animal vision .... suddenly one wonders, are the birds this is meant to attract seeing black and being attracted to it? Or are they seeing "OMG, he sparkles in the near infrared" and responding to that?
So often we perceive these things in terms of our own vision and senses, but often in the animal kingdom they're seeing something entirely different. But maybe the target audience isn't seeing "black", but glowing.