Black | Common News Update

Sep132019 by adminNo Comments

Researchers produce blackest black material to date

Sept. 13 (UPI) -- Material engineers at MIT have produced the blackest black material to date, 10 times blacker than previous record-black materials. The material is composed of microscopic filaments of carbon. In the lab, scientists grew a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes on a chlorine-etched aluminum foil substrate. The foil-based patch of carbon trees captures 99.96 percent of incoming light, a new record. Researchers described the new material this week in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. The authors of the new paper don't expect to hold the record for very long. Eventually, the material's creators predict, material scientists will design a material that absorbs 100 percent of light. "Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that's ever been repor...

Sep52019 by adminNo Comments

Team plans colour film of black hole at galaxy’s centre

Science

The team that took the first ever image of a black hole has announced plans to capture "razor sharp" full colour video of the one at the centre of our galaxy.Satellites would be launched to supplement the existing network of eight telescopes to make this movie.The researchers say the upgraded network will be able to see the supermassive black hole consuming the material around it. The team has been awarded the Breakthrough Award for Physics.Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the idea of the so-called Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), told BBC News that the next step was to see a black hole in action."Just like planets, a black hole rotates. And because of its incredibly strong gravity, it disto...

Aug82019 by adminNo Comments

Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

Technology

About one in four companies revealed personal information to a woman's partner, who had made a bogus demand for the data by citing an EU privacy law.The security expert contacted dozens of UK and US-based firms to test how they would handle a "right of access" request made in someone else's name.In each case, he asked for all the data that they held on his fiancee.In one case, the response included the results of a criminal activity check.Other replies included credit card information, travel details, account logins and passwords, and the target's full US social security number.University of Oxford-based researcher James Pavur has presented his findings at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.It is the first known test of its ki...

Aug72019 by adminNo Comments

Supermassive black hole found to be one of largest-ever discovered

Technology

By Catrin Rutland, news reporter A supermassive black hole has been found to be up to nine times larger than previously expected - making it one of the biggest-ever discovered.The black hole in the Holmberg 15A galaxy has a mass nearly 40 billion times larger than the Sun and is the biggest to be measured using a method called direct dynamical detection. In comparison, images recently captured of another one in the centre of the M87 galaxy showed it was 6.5 billion times bigger than the Sun. Image: The black hole within the M87 galaxy was the first to be photographed - it is 6.5 billion times bigger than the Sun Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is likely to have its own supermassive black hole with an ...

Aug22019 by adminNo Comments

Male black widow spiders hijack silk strands of their rivals to find a mate

Science

Aug. 2 (UPI) -- To find mates, male black widow spiders follow the silk trails left by their rivals, according to a new study. The revelation, detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, surprised scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Scientists assumed males followed the scents, or pheromones, released by females and avoided those emitted by males. It is the pattern followed by most mate-seeking insects. "We expect males to use female cues to find a potential mate, and use those left by their rivals to avoid them," Catherine Scott, a doctoral candidate at UTSC, said in a news release. "We found male black widows follow rather than avoid rival males, using their silk trails as highways that rapidly lead them to a female's web, even if they can't s...