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Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can't see it...
... but you'll have a long wait for the ultimate cocktail dress
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. 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 aluminium 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.
"You expect to see the hills and all you can see … it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange," said Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer.
Asked about the prospect of a little black dress, he said it would be "very expensive" – the cost of the material is one of the things he was unable to reveal.
"You would lose all features of the dress. It would just be something black passing through," he said.
Vantablack, which was described in the journal Optics Express and will be launched at the Farnborough International Airshow this week, works by packing together a field of nanotubes, like incredibly thin drinking straws. These are so tiny that light particles cannot get into them, although they can pass into the gaps between. Once there, however, all but a tiny remnant of the light bounces around until it is absorbed.
Vantablack's practical uses include calibrating cameras used to take photographs of the oldest objects in the universe. This has to be done by pointing the camera at something as black as possible.
It also has "virtually undetectable levels of outgassing and particle fallout", which can contaminate the most sensitive imaging systems. The material conducts heat seven and a half times more effectively than copper and has 10 times the tensile strength of steel.
Stephen Westland, professor of colour science and technology at Leeds University, said traditional black was actually a colour of light and scientists were now pushing it to something out of this world.
"Many people think black is the absence of light. I totally disagree with that. Unless you are looking at a black hole, nobody has actually seen something which has no light," he said. "These new materials, they are pretty much as black as we can get, almost as close to a black hole as we could imagine."
Ursula Vernon creates... beauty.
Originally posted by 
ursulav at Toad Words
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold and gems fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible--fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister--the one who speaks gold and diamonds--funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Can't get more Tatooine than Jawas, a dewback, and lots of sand:
Need a better full length:
Travel broadens the mind:
Khem got new threads:
Currently level 32. I'm having a lot of fun. The quest dialogue makes the occasional grind worth it.
I've spent a lot of time in the past on World of Warcraft. I enjoyed it well enough, leveling my Troll Mage Teufeltusken to 90 over the last few years. WoW's saving grace in my opinion is its scope. It feels like a world. And I loved just going off the beaten path and just exploring.
SW:TOR has a different emphasis. It has to give the impression of many worlds, without the resources that a history of 12 million subscribers gives WoW. So each world seems a bit more constrained. It is however bounds ahead in terms of story. The Lightside/Darkside points underline the black-and-white Star Wars morality. And playing a Sith Sorcerer brings some of the same experience I had playing Vampire: The Masquerade; the thrill of vicarious, imaginary Evil.
I've mentioned the dialogue before: wonderful snarky British voice-acting. The non-Sith paths are voiced by Americans; but the fact the dialogue is acted, rather than just print on screen, adds another dimension. It also lets them do that Star Wars thing of aliens speaking audibly alien languages, with English subtitles. (There must be some marvel of magic tech that is never mentioned that allows everyone to be taught a dozen languages in childhood.)
So this looks interesting, and with content from one of my favourite artist/writers, as well as other names I recognise, such as:
Stephen Blackmoore
Nancy Holder
Leonard Balsera
Chuck Wendig
Kenneth Hite
Richard Dansky
Elizabeth Bear
Tobias Bucknell
Keith Baker
Seanan McGuire
And I think Ursula's self-effacing style is more likely to sell it to British and Australian friends and acquaintances.
Originally posted by ursulav at Storium!
The online storytelling...game? system? interesting hybrid thingy? Storium is running a Kickstarter. They've been in beta for awhile, now they're gearing up to launch.
It's a nifty online role-playing game system, and I'm not sure how else to describe it. Think of the really good bits of a play-by-mail RPG, with an easy to use on-line interface, and with pre-made cards and worlds and whatnot, and the ability to write your own as well. My buddy Mur Lafferty is one of the people working on it, and I've been playing with her, and it's really very cool.
Because Mur's my buddy, and she loves me...or something...she convinced me to be one of the many (many many) authors who are signed up to make worlds for Storium. So I was all geared up to make a post about how I was a stretch goal, and the Weird Fruit world would be fleshed out and made available for all y'all to play around in and have adventures in and tell stories in and whatnot.
Then my stretch goal kinda funded overnight, so it took a little bit of the urgency off. Also I couldn't figure out how to explain it.
Actually, I still kinda can't.
But the guy running it, Stephen Hood, has been very nice about the fact that I am proposing a truly demented world. I mean, everybody else is doing swashbuckling fantasy or dark cyberpunk or whatever, and I'm like "So, you're a rodent in this jungle overrun by killer vegetables..."
"Playful," I believe is the word he came up with. Let's go with that.
So...err...yeah. Basically I'm grabbing a bunch of stuff I've cooked up over the years that always seemed like they SHOULD be part of something, and finally trying to weave them into a cohesive whole. (Finally, I know where Frog Tribe lives...!)
So the theory is that you play as one of a village of rodents in a very strange jungle, full of Squashbats and Manticorn and the deadly Dragonfruit. There'll be a good bit of existing art--I'm not building a world this big from scratch!--but I'll also be cooking up some new stuff as time permits.
Now, I have no idea whether anybody is going to want to play in this world. (Worst. Pitch. Ever.) I mean, I like it, and people buy the art, but does it have anything beyond the gimmick? Is anyone going to WANT to fight Dragonfruit or Cobrachini? Is a selection of rodent races of interest to anyone? I don't know. It may be I create this world and people are like "You're insane and that's too weird."
Or maybe people will be like "I have always wanted to slay Dragonfruit! And I always thought I'd make an awesome guinea pig!" I don't know! I have no idea what people like!
But hey, suppose you HAVE always wanted to slay Dragonfruit. Or other things. You have the chance. And If you're playing in the Weird Fruit world, you can totally make your own as well, so if you want your group of mouse adventurers to be set upon by Piranha Beans or whatever, do it! (Hell, you can ditch the mouse adventurers and all play as frogs. Or fruit. Or whatever. For all I know, you want to be a bunch of plucky vegetables slaying the rodent oppressors.) You get the basics of worldbuilding and a bunch of starter stuff, but you are not limited by whatever weirdnesses I've managed to come up with.
I mean, I can put in a card for the Radishes of Paradise, but if you want to go on the Quest of Seven Mountains to pluck the tailfeathers from the Glorious Radish of Paradise, you can and should and I think that's awesome.
Anyway, you don't actually need to pay money to get the Weird Fruit world into Storium, because it happened already, but there's a lot of other super neat worlds out there by authors who do amazing work. Go! Check 'em out!
And when it's live and I've got a world of demented vegetables and plucky rodent villagers, you should totally come and play around and make your own crazy killer-vegetable adventures. Let's tell a really strange story together!
Saw Winter Soldier. Probably the best Marvel film since Avengers, and that's saying something. Lots of action. Great characters. Great story - which turns the shared universe upside down in many respects. I loved the end-credits homage to the style of Bond and other 70's technothrillers.
Everyone knows Batman and Superman, and any different interpretation invites criticism, often extreme. Iron Man, Thor, etc? Not so much. Even Captain America, who probably does need careful writing to keep local audiences happy, doesn't trigger much negative response for being different to his comic incarnation.
And effectively no-one knows Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man. I don't even think he had a current comic until the movie was mooted.
In fact, the only Avenger with a big public awareness prior to the eponymous movie was the Hulk, and his mixed success with movies show exactly the perils that Batman and Superman faced: constant attempts to interpret or re-interpret the character that fail to make people happy.
Comments
Just read a SF comic by him (Aphrodite IX) the other day.