Super-Black Is the New Black (theatlantic.com) 101
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.
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Black Birds Matter?
I've always thought they [wikipedia.org] do.
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Why would you want answers from people you think of as retards?
Solar cells anyone (Score:2)
Re:Solar cells anyone (Score:5, Informative)
People have tried.
https://phys.org/news/2006-06-... [phys.org]
Silicon surfaces rendered black by pits and bumps only nanometers or billionths of a meter large could in the future help make solar power cells more efficient.
Flat silicon surfaces are normally highly reflective. Scientists want to minimize reflection as much as possible when it comes to solar power cells made of silicon, because the more light they reflect, the less they convert to electricity. Often, anti-reflective coatings are used, which reduce the amount of average reflection in the wavelengths of light solar power cells use by 85 percent to 92 percent.
The novel treatment developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich can cut the surface reflection silicon experiences by 95 percent to 98 percent across the wavelengths of light solar power cells use, making them black.
"The results are really good when it comes to preventing reflection. It is still speculative as to how much this can boost the efficiency of solar cells. I am optimistic that for traditional designs of solar cells, it could give a 15 to 20 percent improvement with respect to their present efficiency. The performance of some solar cells with novel design could be improved even more dramatically. However, I think we will need a bit of time to show this," said researcher Svetoslav Koynov, a physicist.
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Heck, even if the efficiency doesn't go up much, it would be great to be able to cut the glare from reflections to minimize issues to air traffic etc. That's always been one of my larger concerns about blanketing large areas with panels.
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...it would be great...
Unless Anish Kapoor buys the rights and won’t let anyone else use it.
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Well but you can optimize that in a variety of ways by increasing efficiency and hence Wp/m^2. Or you could optimize the cell so it works better in low light conditions. Or you could have a cell with low efficiency but really cheap cells.
E.g. people have suggested thin film cells that you could spray onto large areas of glass and build really large array that was almost as cheap as normal passive glass.
And of course there some applications - solar powered watches or calculators or satellites where you're si
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OTOH, any light that is neither reflected nor converted to electricity will heat the panel, and efficiency decreases as panel temperature increases. So ideally it's best to reflect all light that isn't converted.
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Or you could do stacked junction cells which absorb the whole lot.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
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I think using nano structures in solar cells was one of the things Jesus was alluding to when he told us to 'Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these'. The lilies do not toil spin or so because they use nano structures to harvest solar energy efficiently.
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I think it would have more applications to passive solar (heating) panels. The more light you absorb the more heat you capture.
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Black-Out Blinds (Score:2)
Blinds and curtains to keep the light out. I bet they would have an incredible insulating factor also.
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And you don't think somebody might not use this new discovery to do such a thing?
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Birds make the very best nano-engineers... and they work for next to nothing! Just keep a pile of loose garbage next to their desks and they're happy.
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Re:Black-Out Blinds (Score:5, Informative)
Blinds and curtains to keep the light out. I bet they would have an incredible insulating factor also.
The blacker something is, the more energy it radiates in the near infrared. So I'm going to say that they wouldn't improve the insulating factor. In fact, if you exposed the black side, they would reduce it.
Blackout cloth already blacks out the light sufficiently that the limiting factor is how well you can seal around the edges of your curtains. Exposing the black side would fix this problem, but cause the other problem. The hot outer side of the curtain would heat up the air between the curtain and the glass.
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Sounds like it would make for a nice set to use in the winter. At least on those days the sun comes through.
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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
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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.
I remember reading a howto on passive solar heat for one's home by adding a vent near the floor and the ceiling, and adding a glassed-in black strip on the outside of your home. If you don't want heat, you close the vents. You'd probably need the top vent to switch between outside and inside to avoid heat building up there when it wasn't in use, during the summer.
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Lining of optical devices to reduce internal reflections.
I once took a cheap 90mm refractor and took all the steps I could to eliminate internal reflections. It made a huge difference in contrast, for example on images of Jupiter.
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If you're trying to keep light out then the goal is to reflect it away. The problem with black is it absorbs and thus makes a really horrible insulator.
Ever notice the inside of your beer cooler is not black?
Odd choice of words. (Score:2)
"Technology"? Really?
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I think this might fall under science if that's what you're implying:
https://science.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]
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Then every single thing in the universe contains "nanotechnology".
Dumb.
Re: Odd choice of words. (Score:2)
No, the problem is that bird feathers are not technology, let alone nanotech. Spewing buzzwords in total ignorance to sound "cool" does not make for a useful news for nerds site. Technology is the practical application of knowledge to make things. Animal organs and tissues are not technology.
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Dinosaur technology, literally.
Vantablack (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Vantablack (Score:5, Insightful)
actually I wonder if this might count as prior art to open the tech to other manufacturers...
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No, naturally-occuring structures are not prior art for patent claims. Why would you think they would be?
Because otherwise a business company would be able to patent your genome and cease and desist you from dividing your cells illegally and have the government terminate you.
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actually I wonder if this might count as prior art to open the tech to other manufacturers...
Nature doesn't count as prior tech, but if this discovery leads to other people being able to make a similar product, then there will be competition and everyone will win.
The name [Vantablack] comes from [wikipedia.org] the term[s] "Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays". If you used nanotubes which were aligned in some other fashion, you probably wouldn't interfere with Vantablack's patents, if any. I'm not aware of any actual patents on Vantablack; WP also says that Vertically aligned nanotube arrays are sold by several fi
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You know, I'm not actually sure now that I think about it. I'm just so damn cynical I assumed that it had patents on it.
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If the patent only covers the shape of the surface, then you would have a reasonable argument that the patent would be invalid. I don't think it would technically be considered prior art, instead being evidence that the patent describes something that isn't patentable subject matter (something in nature).
More likely, though, is that the patent would have to be more specific than just the shape anyway. The patent may describe the exact arrangement of the specific mat
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Vantablack has already been invented, move on!
Vantablack absorbs 99.965% of visible light. Which is admittedly better, but to think that these birds have been able to absorb 99.95% of visible light with these feathers for so long is still pretty damn impressive. Especially since it's taken this long do understand why. It's truly impressive how many things we have and can learn from a material science perspective just by looking at what nature has already figured out seemingly at random.
Re: Vantablack (Score:2)
Let's see, collision with another photon to produce a matter antimatter pair? Falling into a black hole? Redshift to zero frequency via expansion of space? I forgot, what was the other way?
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Also, you wouldn't want to wear Vantablack clothes due to the danger of breathing in the carbon nanotubes.
And people would try to sit on you in a movie theater.
Re:Vantablack (Score:5, Informative)
Vantablack has already been invented, move on!
Vantablack has to be grown at 400 C in a furnace, while birds manufacture their feathers somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 C. Far more materials are amiable to being subjected to bird temperatures than Vantablack temperatures. Vantablack surfaces also have to be protected from accidental touching or abrasion, something that bird feathers don't have the luxury of.
Overall, I think there is probably still quite a bit we can learn from birds. Also, they're just neat.
Desiato will be happy (Score:2)
Increase efficiency of solar cells? (Score:2)
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https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
It's like, how much more black could it get? (Score:5, Funny)
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And the other standard joke: They've invented fuligin!
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"this light-trapping nanotechnology can absorb up to 99.95 percent of incoming light"
So the answer is 0.05% more black ;)
*awaits a special 'bird-feather black' edition of Smell The Glove*
Feathers and technology? (Score:2)
Re: Feathers and technology? (Score:2)
God. Duh.
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Oblig Spinal Tap reference: (Score:2)
“It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none — none more black.”
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It gets converted into electricity, which is the bird's primary energy source.
Racist Article (Score:5, Funny)
Blackbirds, it turns out, aren't actually all that black.
How dare you? If a bird wants to self identify as being black, who the hell are you to say that they aren't?
This is just another attempt by the old ivory gull patriarchy to further marginalize an historically oppressed species and deny their cultural identity.
I can't believe that there wasn't a trigger warning on this post. Don't you know that /. needs to be a safe space, free from the tyranny of archaic ways of thought and ideas and words that are by definition violent?
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How dare you? If a bird wants to self identify as being black, who the hell are you to say that they aren't?
Raven Dove-lazal.
Ruby Rhod (Score:2)
Super Green
Hotblack Desiato will want this ... (Score:2)
How black? (Score:2)
Blacker than the blackest black, times infinity.
think outside the box (Score:3, Insightful)
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....
and hank hill is super white! (Score:2)
and hank hill is super white!