The Blackest Material

QuantumCrypto writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created 'the world's first material that reflects virtually no light.' This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and 'smarter' light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."

tsk

[scapermoya]

dupe.

Re:

[numbski]

Dupe, and posting buttons appear busted?

Re:tsk

[Ekhymosis]

As per your signature, if the walls in the dungeon were coated with this stuff, a grue would most definately have its way with you =)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to earlier article: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/0 2/2113206 [slashdot.org]

Re:

[ghoti]

What is actually interesting though is that even the combined wisdom of all the Firehose users has not been able to spot the dupe (and a bunch of others). You can still blame the editors for posting the dupe, but this collaborative filtering should really go much further.

Re:tsk

[HTH NE1]

As a Firehose user, I must say that it gets difficult to keep track of which dupe stories made it to the front page and which are just dupe submissions that have not yet made it to the front page. Despite the distinctive color, the mass of submissions become a blur.

Re:

[syrion]

I apparently submitted my askslashdot question at a bad time of day; it was barely voted on (and voted up), but not enough to get to the front page. What's the etiquette? Can I try again? Do I just pimp it out and say "HAY GUYZ GO VOTE FOR TeamSpeak, Ventrilo - Are there Free alternatives?"

Re:

[vimh42]

but a dupe gives me a chance to relay something I forgot the first time I saw the story.

My mother in law once saw a black shirt that said (in a dark brown font) "I'm just wearing this color until they find something darker."

I guess I've found a new material to make a t-shirt out of.

Re:

[KillerCow]

My mother in law once saw a black shirt that said (in a dark brown font) "I'm just wearing this color until they find something darker."

here [signals.com]

Re: dupe

[KillerCow]

dupe.

Dude, do it with a little style.

Dupe: Reflectivity Reaches a New Low [slashdot.org]

Looks like a fish,

[Clever7Devil]

Moves like a fish, steers like a cow.

Re:

[HTH NE1]

Looks like a fish, Moves like a fish, steers like a cow.

I think you got the wrong ship. I believe that one had an infra-pink lizard emblem on the neutrino housing.

To get this out of the way...

[EvanED]

I guess we know what material Hotblack Desiato used to make his stunt ship...

Re:

[HTH NE1]

I guess we know what material Hotblack Desiato used to make his stunt ship...

Or the Hagunenons' horribly beweaponed chamelioid death flotilla.

Or Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 (TMA-1 a.k.a. The Monolith).

Re:

[HTH NE1]

Except he got the wrong ship. The line was about a ship similar to another they'd looked at that crashed into the third moon of Jaglan Beta. The Hotblack Desiato (or Hagunemnon ship in the radio show) didn't look like a fish at all. It was so black you could hardly make out its shape.

(Yeah, and a few minutes ago I misspelled "Hagunemnon". Though, frankly, I'm not sure what the right spelling is; I don't have the radio scripts.)

Outside

[Rie Beam]

"In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."

Outside of that gravity thing. Sounds more like standing outside in the country.

Re:

[twostar]

To those of us stuck in the cubefarms of the city it's the same thing.

Re:Outside

[Darth Muffin]

... or you could just close your eyes and get the same effect. Much cheaper too :)

All of my kid's Goth friends are probably rejoycing and wondering when they can get a t-shirt or trechcoat made of this stuff.

Re:

[DJ Nanashi]

No no, it's Emo now, not goth.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

no, as a highschool student we have both goth and emo. The difference is goths are just like the same, goths havent changed, emo's on the other hand, are all about being pansy ass little pussies about everything and trying as hard as possible to look and act like emaciated little girls. Also the music is completely different, you cant even compair The Cruxshadows(really good band) to emo shit like falloutboy, panic at the disco, and the other "i hate my life and no one loves me bands"

Re:Outside

[Joebert]

What happened to the good old days when it was "pussy" & everyone knew what you meant ?

Re:

[lawpoop]

Yeah, but when you are outside, don't you see the ground that things are resting on? I'm guessing that when they said "if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls" they meant the floor too. But also, the items would appear to cohere in space as if they were on a floor. Which they are.

Re:Outside

[admactanium]

I expect a very practical use for this material, if it is not too expensive, will be as a wall coating to replace green screens in filmmaking. It would allow lighting the subjects without worry about any light spill onto the background, and maybe allow better keying for special effects. You would just replace all pixel values that equal zero with your own background data, instead of keying on that narrow-band green which is, after all, still green.

except that would be color keying much harder because black naturally exists on objects like people and clothes. the reason things are shot again chroma green and blue is because they're not as commonly occurring in the objects that they're trying to photograph and extract. the reason the green and blue are a very specific color is to make keying easier by isolating that color in one channel of rgb. that way it's much easier to determine the differential information. keying against black is practically useless unfortunately. you'd have to go in and rotoscope everything that is black (like hair or eyeglass frames or belt, etc) or a value of black back in to the image. plus, on set they don't worry about light spilling onto the screen because they're usually much more brightly lit than the subject to keep a consistent tone throughout. presumeably, the reason they use blue and green is to allow for photography of subjects that are in the other color range (ie, guy with green shirt on bluescreen, guy with blueshirt on greenscreen). nobody keys against chroma red because obviously everyone's skin would cause them to be semi-transparent.

if you're talking about the key color spilling into the subject (like in between hair and such) than that's a different issue. that's why when you do a telecine, you'll do what's called a "suppress pass" which desaturated all of the key's color. that way you can comp the original footage minus the key color back into the comp to kill the color spill without having to hand-draw it into each frame.

i'm sure it could be used for some pretty interesting techniques in photography and film but color keying isn't likely to be one of them.

Re:

[Walt Dismal]

I agree mostly, but note I did say pixels of zero. I meant by that absolute pure black, complete absence of reflectance. In a normally-lit scene I would expect no things would be completely down on the 'floor' i.e. r=0 b= g=0 and so pure black could be keyable. True pure black would not exist on people or objects but would with this background material, allowing a new approach in lighting. One of the problems I find with dynamic range in movie images is that the shadows/black usually block up, but in nature

Re:

[Walt Dismal]

Coat the inside of cameras (and lens barrels), yes, great application!

Sine I posted, I realized there are some flaws in my model of the luminance dynamics and in the post-processing, so I have to go rethink that all. My film work was decades ago and mostly industrial anyway.

I wonder if the military already has some form of this material, by the way. Er, probably captured from a crashed saucer, of course. (cough)

4x reflectors

[purduephotog]

At Kodak when we needed 'black' to capture no matter how much light was tossed on the film (for targets) we used a special designed prism- it consisted of 4 highly polished black angled walls and an aperture that, given any direction light would enter, would require a minimum of 4x reflections in order to exit.

Each of the walls reflected 0.1% of the light.... so the entire setup reflected 0.1^4 (%).... or about 'nothing'.

Anyway... The real reason I posted here is there's a guy on Ebay selling virtual backdr

Re:

[ibennetch]

Like others have said, I don't know how well this would work; I think chromakey techniques (green or blue screens) are better (but because chroma keys are cleaner than luma keys, not because of the black problem); but your theory could work just fine under the right circumstances. I work in TV and have done keys just as you describe (though graphic keys, not people, but the concept is the same). With analog (composite) video, the blackest part of the picture should be 7.5% (IRE [wikipedia.org]) -- not 0; because of some bo

Re:

[alienmole]

...while high enough to feel as though you're floating.

#GGGGGG

[Anonymous Coward]

So, THAT black?

Re:#GGGGGG

[dr_dank]

It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

Thank you. I checked in on this thread solely to make sure the appropriate Tap reference was in place. Carry on.

Re:#GGGGGG

[skoaldipper]

Well, you know what they say...

Once you go #GGGG, you never go ^H^H^H^H.

Re:

[ghoti]

Which, in unsigned 4-bit int, would of course be #FFFFFF ...

Re:

[ghoti]

Gnaaaa, you're confusing me! I meant of course 8-bit, not 4-bit, since colors have three 8-bit components, not six 4-bit ones. Rest of the comment still holds, though, and proves that black equals white, for really dark shades of black.

Something Darker

[thomas.galvin]

Finally, the prophecy [signals.com] can be fulfilled.

how much more black could this be?

[chameleon_skin]

The answer is none.

None more black.

Re:

[Dr. Spork]

Apparently they only thought it couldn't get more black. Now it seems somebody has learned how to turn the black up to 11. I smell a new album... (and the glove).

Dolomite

[Irongeek_ADC]

You mean it's not Dolomite?

Re:

[analogheretic]

I think you mean Dolemite [imdb.com], not dolomite [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[re6smith]

It's the hip black material that won't cop out when there's light all about.

Possible uses for the military?

[purpledinoz]

It says that it reflects virtually no light. I wonder if that includes the frequencies that are used for radar. If it doesn't reflect any radar signals, that could radically change military aircraft. Currently, military aircraft use shape as well as radar absorbing materials to achieve their stealthy-ness. Imagine if you can coat an F-16 with this stuff, and bam, you have a pretty cheap stealth fighter.

Re:

[SirTalon42]

Just don't fly it during the day.

Re:

[Carnildo]

I bet this stuff washes off in the rain, though.

Re:

[Bill Dog]

The rain would, if it could only see it.

Re:

[mgv]

It says that it reflects virtually no light. I wonder if that includes the frequencies that are used for radar. If it doesn't reflect any radar signals, that could radically change military aircraft. Currently, military aircraft use shape as well as radar absorbing materials to achieve their stealthy-ness. Imagine if you can coat an F-16 with this stuff, and bam, you have a pretty cheap stealth fighter.


To detect this on radar you use two radars in two different positions and look for discrepancies in areas

Re:

[namityadav]

"To detect this on radar you use two radars in two different positions and look for discrepancies in areas that don't return a signal."

In theory, the two radars will not return any signal (From the empty space, and from the aircraft) .. so there will be no discrepancy, right?

Re:

[multipartmixed]

He just forgot to mention the part about releasing thousands and thousands of doves wearing little tin-foil hats in order to provide a return signal.

Re:

[monopole]

This stuff is handy for avoiding LIDAR on glinty surfaces like windows. But the trick is making a surface which resists dirt, and water and can handle wear and tear.
Of course, it's useless for radar, but similar principles are easy at radar frequencies (pretty much subwavelength anechoic tile) but not aerodynamic.

Re:

[dctoastman]

Not really, because you could just start looking for places on the radar that aren't coming back rather than points that are returning faster than normal.

Re:

[nuzak]

A blindfold works pretty well for that too.

Re:

[chgros]

The interesting thing about light is that it's NOT radar.
Maybe not, but they're both electromagnetic waves (though with a very different wavelength). So the question may be relevant.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

The interesting thing about light is that it's NOT radar.
Maybe not, but they're both electromagnetic waves (though with a very different wavelength). So the question may be relevant.

It's not particularly relevant. The wavelength difference between radar and light is in the range of 20000 to one. You need two different antennas to pick up AM and FM, and they are only different by about two orders of magnitude (100:1). Dealing with electromagnetic radiation has everything to do with wavelength. A material "tuned" to absorb the maximum about of EM radiation between 400 and 700 nanometers wavelength is utterly unsuited to the task of absorbing radar at 1-4 centimeters. I'm not trying to b

Re:

[Dun Malg]

typo above: most radar sits in the range of 1-40 centimeters

Re:

[Dun Malg]

Wavelength is pretty much the determining factor in hw EM radiation interacts with matter. Visible light is 400-700 nanometers, whereas radar is in the range of 1-40 centimeters.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

My God, please mod this insightful. Snide, yes, AC, yes, but a completely valid point.

Valid? Sure-- about as valid as "if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass a-hoppin'"

He pointed out the obvious and then did nothing with it. Hardly insightful.

Military use?

[Ekhymosis]

I hate to be a warmonger here, but this stuff could probably be used in military applications as well, probably for night ops and the like. A modern day ninja outfit with this stuff comes to mind, or if the stuff could be tweaked to not only absorb light, but radar as well.

If it reflects virutally nothing, I wonder how it dissipitates heat, or if heat is even a factor in this.

Re:Military use?

[Carnildo]

I hate to be a warmonger here, but this stuff could probably be used in military applications as well, probably for night ops and the like. A modern day ninja outfit with this stuff comes to mind

Contrary to popular belief, the best color for urban night camoflage is not solid black. Depending on the environment, it's either charcoal grey (for general hard-to-see-ness), or irregularly-patterned greys (to break up the outline of your body).

Re:Military use?

[Dun Malg]

I hate to be a warmonger here, but this stuff could probably be used in military applications as well, probably for night ops and the like. A modern day ninja outfit with this stuff comes to mind

Contrary to popular belief, the best color for urban night camoflage is not solid black. Depending on the environment, it's either charcoal grey (for general hard-to-see-ness), or irregularly-patterned greys (to break up the outline of your body).

Indeed. This is because everything occurring in nature tends to reflect some light, even in the dark, when there isn't much to reflect. Solid black doesn't reflect enough, and subsequently actually stands out like a big empty void in a gray jumble of dimness.

Re:

[istartedi]

Depends on the city of course. Around here, the optimal pattern is a mix of concrete and brick spattered with rat feces and black magic marker grafiti. You'll blend right in.

Re:

[Squirmy McPhee]

I hate to be a warmonger here, but this stuff could probably be used in military applications as well, probably for night ops and the like. A modern day ninja outfit with this stuff comes to mind, or if the stuff could be tweaked to not only absorb light, but radar as well.

If it reflects virutally nothing, I wonder how it dissipitates heat, or if heat is even a factor in this.

It doesn't absorb anything. It's simply several layers of silicon dioxide nanotubes whose index of refraction is controlled by

Display screens?

[mangu]

If it doesn't reflect any light, it would be perfect for monitor screens. Of course, assuming it's transparent and it doesn't let light reflected by the substrate pass through.

Blackness

[ElephanTS]

Emo's are going to love this stuff.

THERE'S JUST NO POINT ANY MORE!

[Bertie]

What on earth are we going to do with this now that Johnny Cash is dead? Eh?

None more black

[spagthorpe]

"It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black." -- Nigel Tufnel

Re:

[pohl]

"Well I think it looks like death." -- David St. Hubbins.

Re:

[dctoastman]

"Every movie, in every cinema is about death. Death sells!" - Ian Faith

Again?

[pclminion]

It seems that even the blackest material in existence is no match for the reflective power of a dupe-posting Slashdot editor.

Doesn't work for me

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

"giving a sense of floating free in infinite space" Well I tried standing in a dark space with my eyes shut, which must be pretty much the same thing, and all that happened to me was that I felt like an idiot, especially when people saw me climbing back out of the office supply cabinet.

Claustrophobics rejoice

[GiovanniZero]

Assuming this isn't just vaporware...

This stuff could be really cool for use in MRIs or other tight spaces that claustrophobics normally have to go into. It would give those that are normally afraid to be in small spaces the sense that they were in a vastly infinite space. That's pretty cool IMO.

I'd also like to have my home theater coated with this stuff, think about how large your house would feel! Even with low level ceilings.

Re:

[The MAZZTer]

If we all did what you propose, pretty soon everyone would have broken noses from bumping into walls so much.

Re:

[lawpoop]

Isn't part of claustrophobia the sound clues that tell you you're in a tight space? I don't know it , so I don't know. But I heard that MRIs make a racket.

Re:

[treeves]

I doubt that would work. Being inside a small cylinder, visual cues are not the only thing giving you a sense of what you're in. Sound is also an important indicator.

I need this stuff

[popo]

... to be the biggest gothtard evar!

Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get a picture?

Re:

[biocute]

I haven't clicked on the link yet, because my Slashdot instinct warns me of goatse, can a newbie confirm the link is good by posting the actual URL (instead of tinyurl)?

Automated Dup Rating Score Would Help...

[Ron Bennett]

Often dups will contain similar links, phrases, keywords, etc to the originally posted article ... it seems to me that an automated system could be developed that would assign a "dup rating" score to submitted articles to make dups easier to spot beforehand.

Ron

Yeah, it looks good, but...

[fireman sam]

Does it come in red?

Can't be as black as a really black black pudding!

[SpinyNorman]

Black pudding is very black today, Mother.
Yes, it is black today, dear.
Aye, that's very black tha' tis'. Even the white bits are black!

Is it blacker than priests socks?

[Larry Lightbulb]

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!

Fuligin!

[Diomedes01]

One step closer to getting a Fuligin cloak for that Severian costume I've always wanted to wear to Halloween parties.

As a sysadmin...

[Mr. Roadkill]

I want to know when I can get a shirt made out of it.

It's sooooo black....

[PhotoGuy]

That even a previous article [slashdot.org] about the stuff failed to be seen by /. editors.

This would work great for....

[Brad1138]

Wile E. Coyote painting tunnels on rocks.

it is so black that...

[3seas]

both the original article and the dupe, when I troed to go to the link I get some sort of reset and never to the page.

Fuligin

[Phoenix666]

Ever since I read Shadow of the Torturer I've wanted something that's fuligin.

Energy

[Joebert]

What does it do with all this light it absorbs ?

Why dupe?

[jinkside]

Why did people think this is/was a dupe? It looks genuine, even though the URL didn't work for me. http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=1956 [rpi.edu] worked for me, though, which I got from their main page.

Re:

[NotHereOrThere]

The TFA is about a perfectly black coating that reflects nothing. This does not imply that it is transparent as you seem to be inferring.

Re:Actually...

[DittoBox]

HOMER: What are you inferring?
LISA: I'm not inferring anything. You infer; I imply.
HOMER: Well that's a relief.

Re:

[Bill Dog]

By "reflects virtually no light", read "absorbs virtually all light". Hence the applicability, for example, in creating much more efficient solar panels.

Not to mention moving us one step closer, possibly, to having a real Holodeck!

Re:Actually...

[jdwilso2]

this is a faulty assumption ... I'll leave the "virtually" out to simplify the statements, but here you go ...

to say something "reflects no light" does not mean it "absorbs all light" ...

you are leaving out transmission of light. If a material does not reflect light, it either absorbs or transmits all the rest of the light.

which is actually what this article is talking about ... material clearer than glass but not quite as clear as air.

this was quite an errant post as it is both a dupe and factually flawed.

Re:

[Bob54321]

You think three days is a record? In what way... there have been dupes on the front page at the same time. You must be talking about that three days was a long time before an article got duped.

(I was going to use the usual "you must be new here" but I looked at your number and decided it wouldn't work...)

Re:

[Dun Malg]

You just duped a story from three days ago. Do you guys even read your own site?

Of course not. They're not actually editors. They're not even nerds. They're a bunch of dumbfuck kids left in charge of what was once an interesting message board. It's not just the Slashvertisements, astroturf articles, and just plain un-nerdy, non-mattering stuff. Have you seen the idiotic poll questions lately? How about the current poll? What kind of true nerd asks "What is your favorite test" and fails to include two of the three grand-daddy nerd tests of all? They got Turing, but that's the obvious o

Re:Is this a record?

[maxume]

Things to help you relax are available in liquid, pill, written, aural, visual, surgical and human forms, among others. Maybe give one of them some serious consideration.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

Things to help you relax are available in liquid, pill, written, aural, visual, surgical and human forms, among others. Maybe give one of them some serious consideration.

Venting my spleen on Slashdot is the second most relaxing thing I have available to me. The first is Vicodin, and they won't give me any more of that.

Re:

[Carnildo]

coat my car with this..... no reflection, no return, lidar that....... :)

LIDAR works by bouncing the laser beam off of the highly-reflective license plate. Yes, I suppose you could paint over the plate with this stuff, but then they could just pull you over for driving with an obscured plate :-)

Re:

[Dun Malg]

Yeah, and (like) imagine if we all had flying guitars we could ride around on, and they'd (like) play themselves, and we'd be famous rock stars too!

Seriously, man, we're you actually going anywhere with that crowd control shield thing? Andwhy here?

Re:What does it look like?

[Russ Steffen]

Here's a picture, in one of the very few graphic formats Slashdot will accept in a comment, XBM -

#define noname_width 16
#define noname_height 16
static char noname_bits[] = {
0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00, 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00, 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,
0x00,0x00};

Re:

[dctoastman]

Black is the abscence of light, not color.
White is the abscence of color.

Re:

[failure-man]

So the cover y'see. It needs to be black.
Uh huh.
Yeah. Like, really black. Blacker than the blackest black. TIMES INFINITY.
Okay.
And inside of the case is the same black. Also the CD, so when you open the black case what's inside? MORE BLACKNESS!
Right.
Also, make the other side of the CD black too, so you won't even know WHICH SIDE goes down!
You can't do that. The music side has to be shiny.
Aw man. That sucks.