Sunday 29 April 2018

A Few Days Ago,

we made a post about,


 Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise, apart from being so usual it has now a new claim to fame, in a study out early this year in the journal Nature Communications, reveals that those feathers absorb 99.95 percent of light, and virtually identical to the 99.965 percent of light that Vantablack, the world’s darkest artificial substance, can absorb, and it’s all thanks to black feathers structured like a forest of chaos, the black feathers of the male bird of paradise eat light, that’s because unlike your typical bird feather, which is more or less neatly structured with branches that branch off of branches, kind of like a fractal, the bird of paradise feather looks like an irregular forest of trees (see the image below for a comparison),


this leads to a whole lot of cavities in the feather, "Light strikes the feather, and is repeatedly scattered within these cavities," says Harvard evolutionary biologist Dakota McCoy, lead author of the paper. "Each time it scatters, a little bit is absorbed, so that's how they become so black, the whole point, we think, of these feathers is to trick her eye and brain into thinking that there's less light illuminating the male than there really is," says McCoy. "So to her eye, when her world is an incredibly dark black background and then a vivid blue spot, the spot looks even brighter, and it even looks like it's glowing, it may even look like it’s floating in space" and how black is it? "We blasted it (the feather) with gold so that we could look at it under a microscope," says McCoy, "but then we noticed amazingly that it still looked black even though we had put a 5 nanometer layer of gold over the entire surface." The super-black feather, it seems, just won’t quit being super black, how absolutely amazing.

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