background preloader

Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can't see it... - Science - News

Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can't see it... - Science - News
Puritans, Goths, avant-garde artists, hell-raising poets and fashion icon Coco Chanel all saw something special in it. Now black, that most enigmatic of colours, has become even darker and more mysterious. A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. If it was used to make one of Chanel's little black dresses, the wearer's head and limbs might appear to float incorporeally around a dress-shaped hole. Actual applications are more serious, enabling astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems to function more effectively. The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. "You expect to see the hills and all you can see … it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. A sample of the new material. "You would lose all features of the dress. "Many people think black is the absence of light.

The Most Astonishing Wave-Tracking Experiment Ever : Krulwich Wonders... Claude Monet /The Metropolitan Museum of Art I'm standing on a beach and I see, a few hundred yards out, a mound of water heading right at me. It's not a wave, not yet, but a swollen patch of ocean, like the top of a moving beach ball, what sailors call a "swell." As it gets closer, its bottom hits the rising shore below, forcing the water up, then over, sending it tumbling onto the beach, a tongue of foam coming right up to my toes — and that's when I look down, as the wave melts into the sand and I say, "Hi, I'm from New York. Yes, I'm asking a wave to tell me where it was born. His name is Walter Munk, now in his 90s and a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. His equations said that the swells hitting beaches in Mexico began some 9,000 miles away — somewhere in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean, near Antarctica. "Could it be?" He decided to find out for himself. Professor Munk was not the first scientist to study swells. ...

Le graphène ouvre la voie à un laser impossible auparavant Les électrons au sein de la couche de graphèneDes chercheurs du centre de recherche allemand Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf ont montré dans la revue Nature Physics que les propriétés du graphène dans un champ magnétique ouvraient la voie à la création d’un laser unique en son genre. Les travaux ont été menés en partenariat avec le Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses de Grenoble, entre autres. Lorsqu’ils ont exposé une couche de graphène à un champ magnétique de quatre Tesla, soit un champ quarante fois plus important qu’un aimant fer à cheval, les scientifiques ont remarqué que les électrons traversant le graphène occupaient seulement certains états et lorsqu’ils ont utilisé un laser à électrons libres pour examiner ces états, ils se sont rendu compte que les électrons prenaient à leur tour des états bien précis. Cela signifie qu’en changeant le champ magnétique, il est possible de changer la façon dont les électrons traversent le graphène.

Why do we have blood types? When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction. It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type. And yet there remained some nagging questions. In 1900 the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types, winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research in 1930. “Isn’t it amazing?” My knowledge that I’m type A comes to me thanks to one of the greatest discoveries in the history of medicine. Such calamities gave transfusions a bad reputation for 150 years.

Graphene-based mesh to stop bleeding and disinfect wounds - Graphene Tracker 32 Flares Filament.io 32 Flares × DETROIT, May 10, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nano Labs Corp. (OTCQB:CTLE) is pleased to announce today it has developed an innovative hemostatic material which it has filed for provisional patent and is currently presenting to the biomedical industry. The new innovation includes a nano biotechnology hemostatic mesh, which creates a mechanical barrier stopping blood flow in wounds and integrates both physical and chemical protection, and antibacterial properties. The proprietary nano material is made with polyvinyl nanofibers, graphene oxide sheets and plate nanoparticles which combine to produce a water-soluble synthetic polymer which has excellent film forming quality, a high tensile strength and flexibility, and allows for emulsifying of additional biomedical enhancing materials that would otherwise not be able to be blended together. “There have been a number of patented hemostatic materials that are based on the use of nanofibers. Source: Nano Labs

The Map Of Native American Tribes You've Never Seen Before : Code Switch Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has designed a map of Native American tribes showing their locations before first contact with Europeans. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption itoggle caption Hansi Lo Wang/NPR Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has designed a map of Native American tribes showing their locations before first contact with Europeans. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR Finding an address on a map can be taken for granted in the age of GPS and smartphones. Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Okla., has pinpointed the locations and original names of hundreds of American Indian nations before their first contact with Europeans. As a teenager, Carapella says he could never get his hands on a continental U.S. map like this, depicting more than 600 tribes — many now forgotten and lost to history. Carapella has designed maps of Canada and the continental U.S. showing the original locations and names of Native American tribes.

sante Secrets of the Creative Brain As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study. He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.

News Archives • Graphene Tracker Graphenea names Grafen Co. as the Middle East distributor By Marko Spasenovic on April 21, 2014 Grafen Co. and Graphenea S.A. have entered into an agreement for the distribution of Graphenea’s products in Turkey and Middle Eastern Countries. The product line includes all CVD based graphene sheets, graphene oxide dispersions, reduced graphene oxide powders and related services. “We look forward to servicing the Middle Eastern region with the Graphenea product line”, […] Click for more… planarTECH licenses MoS2 process from Columbia University & delivers first MoS2-capable CVD system to the University of Oxford By Marko Spasenovic on April 14, 2014 planarTECH announced that it has licensed an a process for production of MoS2 from Columbia University, and delivered its first MoS2-capable CVD system to the University of Oxford. planarTECH has recently branched out into process and equipment for other 2D materials that are complementary to its activities in the graphene market. Click for more…

Louis Del Monte Interview On The Singularity

Related: