Posts Tagged ‘Black hole’
“Any color– so long as it is black”*…
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. To stare at the “super black” coating made of carbon nanotubes – each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair – is an odd experience. It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost, leaving nothing but an apparent abyss.
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. Then there are the military uses that the material’s maker, Surrey NanoSystems, is not allowed to discuss.
The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminum foil by the Newhaven-based company. While the sheets may be crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, this landscape disappears on areas covered by it [as seen in the photo above]…
Read more about the new material– “pretty much as black as we can get, almost as close to a black hole as we could imagine”– in “Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can’t see it.”
* Henry Ford, describing the choices in purchasing a Model T
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As we reach for our torches, we might recall that it was on this date in 622 that the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who’d been warned of a pending assassination attempt, and his followers began their migration from Mecca to Medina– an event known as “Hijra” (Arabic: هِجْرَة hijrah, or Hijrat or Hegira). The Hijra was later declared the beginning of the Muslim calendar, so that any subsequent date is known. a la “AD” or “CE,” as “AH” (Anno Hijra).
Flu shot? Check. But what about…
From Cooties to The Phage, Wikipedia’s List of Fictional Diseases… The illustration above is from Charles Burn’s comic series Black Hole— and anchors the Publishers Weekly list of fictional diseases (all additive to the Wkipedia roster).
As we up our Vitamin C intake, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that the first human heart transplant was made. Dr. Christian Barnard stitched the heart of a 25-year-old auto accident victim into 57-year-old Lewis Washkansky. Branard was following the technique developed in the 1950s at Stanford, where, in 1958, Norman Shumway achieved the first successful heart transplant (in a dog).
Tabletop science…
source: RSC
Two bulletins…
First, from New Scientist:
An electromagnetic “black hole” that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.
A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.
Narimanov and Kildishev reasoned that it should be possible to build a device that makes light curve inwards towards its centre in a similar way… Now Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have turned Narimanov and Kildishev’s theory into practice, and built a “black hole” for microwave frequencies…
More (including a cool video) at New Scientist.
Then, from Network World:
A 12 million digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The number, known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1 . A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated.
The computing project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) made the discovery on a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathematics Department. Computing manager Edson Smith installed and maintained the GIMPS software at UCLA, and thousands of other volunteers also participated in the computation…
More at Network World.
(Readers may recall that (R)D reported last March on GIMP and the effort to find the next Mersenne Prime– at which point the estimation was that it might stretch to a mere 10 million digits. Clearly, GIMP’s over-achievement affirms its worthiness of the EFF award.)
As we channel Mr. Wizard, we might run a celebratory riff for Charles Edward Anderson “Chuck” Berry, born on this date in 1926– Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll!
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