The 'World's Darkest Material' Debuts

Goths, cocktail waitresses, and the "deepest" of poets should all be thrilled this week, as it was announced that black just got darker. Researchers have managed to craft a material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 percent of visible light.

Besides setting a new world record and finally giving Hemmingway's terse descriptions of the color black a bit more meaning, the researchers have also succeeded in taking nano materials to a new level.

Made of carbon nanotubes - each about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - the material, called Vantablack, looks more like an abyss than a physical substance. It was presented to the public for the first time at the Farnborough International Air Show this past weekend.

Vantablack is "grown" on sheets of aluminum foil, but even when the sheets are crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, these new shapes cannot be made out even in the most heavily lit of rooms. This is due to the fact that our eyes are receive no new information from the material.

"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," Ben Jensen, the chief technical officer behind Vantablack, told The Independent.

According to Jensen, who works for Surrey NanoSystems, if a woman were to wear a black dress made from the material, her features would entirely disappear, and it would appear that she is being blacked out by a two-dimensional dress-like shape from all angles.

So with cocktail dresses ruled out, what else could Vantablack be used for?

"Vantablack... reduces stray-light, improving the ability of sensitive telescopes to see the faintest stars, and allows the use of smaller, lighter sources in space-borne black body calibration systems. Its ultra-low reflectance improves the sensitivity of terrestrial, space and air-borne instrumentation," Jensen explained in a statement.

According to the company, there is already a demand for the bizarre abyss-like material, with the first customers being from defense and space sectors.