Brazilian velvet ant is ultrablack | Hacker News Reader

Brazilian velvet ant is ultrablack

nytimes.com

41 pointsbookofjoe26 comments

Also called fuligin ('the color darker than black') https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fuligin

fuligin: soot, lampblack. a hypothetical colour darker than black.

I discovered this word from the book series shadow of the torturer/book of the new sun vol 1 & 2. The main character has a fuligin cloak.

For later reading: https://old.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/

Nobody tell Anish Kapoor about them.

https://www.thecollector.com/vantablack-anish-kapoor-stuart-...

Sadly, my first thought when seeing this article.

https://archive.ph/0VqgN

> About the size of a board game die

Is there a standard size that most dice are? I've seen... I think from a quarter inch or so to a whole inch.

From the original scientific paper:

https://imgur.com/a/ZLDbU7N

Bird-of-paradise and peacock spider FTW!

The number of variations produced by evolution is truly astonishing. Dizzying to think of every species of the past 500 million years that we will never know.

The photograph doesn't seem to corroborate the claim. Is it of the correct animal?

The sunlit parts of its black "fur" are much lighter than those in shadow. It looks like ordinary, everyday black.

Is 1% reflectance really so low as to be termed ultrablack? As opposed to "very black" or whatever.

The word ultrablack appears 9 times in the article, if you were curious.

Wikipedia says that “ultra-black” is a transmittance below 0.5%. I think “ultra-black” is a meaningless term used purely for hype. And not an indication of a serious scientific background for the person who wrote the article.

We studied the ultrastructure of the ultrablack cuticle in Traumatomutilla bifurca, an enigmatic and visually striking species of velvet ants (Hymenoptera, Mutillidae). Using a combination of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), and optical spectroscopy, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the cuticle to elucidate its unique optical properties. SEM imaging provided a detailed surface morphology, while TEM provided insights into the internal structure. CLSM showed that the cuticle exhibits no autofluorescence. Our findings reveal a highly specialized cuticle, characterized by microstructures that effectively minimize reflectance and enhance light absorption. Optical spectrometry confirmed the ultrablack nature of the cuticle, with the measured reflectance approaching minimal levels across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Therefore, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of ultrablack biological materials and their potential applications in biomimetics.

The abstract linked from the article. Hope they update Wikipedia. https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjnano/articles/15/122

> The abstract linked from the article.

Right, I take back the bit about the scientific background, which was unnecessarily harsh. It’s still a meaningless term.

> Hope they update Wikipedia.

An article using the term is not a reason to update anything. The definition they use is that it reflects “an exceptionally low amount of visible light”, and they refer to two other articles that do not include a formal definition either. It’s a poorly-defined term used to hype one’s research. This sort of thing is unfortunately common in science and not in itself a reason to get excited.

The title of the journal article the story is based on, from the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, is "Ultrablack color in velvet ant cuticle".

So, no, I don't think this reflects anything about the author of the article. Sorry.

Yeah, as I said, unnecessarily harsh. I also sometimes use marketing terms in my articles, and it’s not great.

Do you work in the field? The author of the NYT piece has a physics doctorate from UChicago.

I do, and I do have a PhD (though the bar is not that high). Not optics or entomology, but nanostructures and radiation.

See, this is why I'm glad I asked.

"Ultra-black is a meaningless term... [insert extremely strong opinions about what is or is not truly ultra-black]."

> Classic HN would be more like:

> "Actually, the reflectance properties of biological ultrablack materials have been well-studied. Here's a 2019 paper in Nature showing that certain deep-sea fish achieve 0.05% reflectance through specialized melanosomes. The ant's 1% is remarkable for a terrestrial organism due to [technical explanation]. Here's some interesting papers on biomimetic applications..."

> Instead we get: "Wikipedia says..."

> The contrast is stark:

> Old HN: Deep technical discussions, sources, papers

> New: "I checked Wikipedia and counted words"

> It's like watching someone try to critique a research paper by counting how many times they used the word "quantum" rather than engaging with the actual quantum mechanics.

> The "Wikipedia says..." on HN feels as out of place as someone posting "FIRST!!!" would have been in the old days. It's such a perfect example of discussion culture decay.

I don’t know what you’re on about. The article and its references did not provide a non-ambiguous definition. Instead, we have “highly absorptive colors”. I did not claim that Wikipedia was the arbiter of truth, but in the absence of any definition in the article it’s fair game. I am not going to go through a literature review for this, either. I already spent an order of magnitude more time to read that article’s references than you took to write… this.

> I don’t know what you’re on about.

Yes, that is partly my fault.

Katrina Miller, New York Times reporter who wrote the cited article:

My Background

I joined The Times as part of the 2023-24 Newsroom Fellowship, a program for early career journalists, after earning a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. In school, I studied how subatomic particles called neutrinos interact with matter, knowledge that may some day reveal why we have a universe. I graduated with a B.S. in physics from Duke University in 2016.

I’m waiting for it to be rebranded as “hyper black” or “hyper converged black”.

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