“A team of researchers at King Abdulla University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia has made the blackest material ever created by human beings. As they note in their paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, the idea for the material came from the all-white cyphochilus beetle. As the researches also note, it is likely impossible to create the perfect black material that absorbs all of the energy that strikes it, and then emits it without any loss of energy. Still, scientists would like to come closer because it is believed that such materials could help in creating better or more efficient devices, such as solar collectors. In this new effort, the team bested the blackness of previous materials using carbon nanotubes by emulating what they found when studying the all-white cyphochilus beetle. The result was a an extremely tiny nanoparticle rod resting on an equally tiny nanoparticle sphere (30 nm diameter), which was able to absorb approximately 98 to 99 percent of the light in the spectrum between 400 and 1,400 nm, which meant that it is able to absorb approximately 26 percent more light than any other known material—and it does so from all angles and polarizations.”