NASA Creates Super-Black Carbon Nanotube Coating 132
An anonymous reader writes "NASA has just revealed a new, super-black material, claiming it is the most light absorbent material ever developed, and capable of absorbing 99% of ultraviolet, infrared, far-infrared, and visible light. The super-black material is about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair and created using carbon nanotubes. Those nanotubes are positioned and grown on multiple other materials including silicon, stainless steel, and titanium. The process of applying the coating requires heating the surface up to 1,382 degrees in an oven filled with a 'carbon-coating feedstock gas.' As well as being up to 100x more absorbent than anything that has come before, the coating is significantly lighter than the black paint and epoxy commonly used today to absorb light. Because the light absorption level is so high, the super-black material will also keep temperatures down for the instruments it is used on. And that very high absorption rate brings one final big advantage: it allows measurements to be taken at much greater distances in space because it removes the light emitted from around planets and stars as well as any generally high-contrast area of space."
Re:1,382 degrees F (Score:3, Insightful)
Where exactly do you draw the line for 'life begins', and why?
Well, I don't know what the OP would say, but in scientific circles, the question was quite clearly answered back in the mid-1800s, by Louis Pasteur et al. And the clear answer was: It doesn't. We may not know what happened 4.5 billion years ago when our planet was young, but today it's rather well determined that life only continues as a branch of earlier life.
This applies to us humans as it does to everything else living on the planet. The instance of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm doesn't create a new life; it merges two previous living creatures into a single living creature. The participants are at all times alive, and no new life is created.
And note that human ova and sperm are quite definitely human. Straightforward DNA tests will verify this.
The whole religious issue of when "life" begins is bogus. It doesn't. At least, not on our planet. People who claim it does simply don't understand how our reproductive process works. (This doesn't prevent them from reproducing, of course; they don't need to understand for it to work.)
Now I'll wander off, humming Every Sperm is Sacred ...