Nanotech "soft black stars"?

[DeathfareDevil]

Probably not, but it sounds cool, anyway.

Quote

TROY, N.Y., Feb. 20 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rice University said they've created the darkest material ever made by man. The material, a thin coating comprised of low-density arrays of loosely vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light, could one day be used to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of solar energy conversion, infrared sensors and other devices, Rensselaer Polytechnic said in a release. "It is a fascinating technology, and this discovery will allow us to increase the absorption efficiency of light as well as the overall radiation-to-electricity efficiency of solar energy conservation," Rensselaer physics professor Shawn-Yu Lin said in a statement. "The key to this discovery was finding how to create a long, extremely porous vertically-aligned carbon nanotube array with certain surface randomness, therefore minimizing reflection and maximizing absorption simultaneously." The findings were published in the journal Nano Letters.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science...d_in_lab/7771/

[Cyril Tourneur]

Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth


Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007.
This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole. The Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to safeguarding humanity from what it considers threats to our existence, has stated that artificial black holes could "threaten all life on Earth" and so it proposes to set up "self-sustaining colonies elsewhere."
But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told LiveScience.



miniscule, but still relevant (if we're lucky....)