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Banta Black is made from carbon.
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Scientists say there are about one billion carbon nanotubes in a square centimeter of Vantaa black.
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It's one of the darkest man made substances in existence.
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And though it was originally designed to help with space engineering, it's found other uses from providing a bottomless looking background on a $95,000 watch to cloaking a building in South Korea's 2018 Winter Olympic Park.
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Vantaa Black absorbs 99.96% of the light that hits it.
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It makes three D objects look flat.
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So how is it possible that Vantaa Black could eventually help us see things we can't see now?
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It is so black, it looks like a mistake.
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Allow these things might look black and we might even call them black.
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But they're not actually true black.
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But this this is closer to true black, and it's revolutionizing everything from space exploration, toe architectural.
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It's very hard to comprehend the blackest black in the world.
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I mean, you hear it, it makes sense.
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You think you can conceptualize it, but seeing it is something very, very, very different.
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No so black that it changes dimensionality of an object.
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It's not a color, it's the absence of color.
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So it's what happens when you have no light reflected back to the viewer.
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You see nothing so your brain paints.
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It is black.
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It might look like paint, but it's actually made up of microscopic carbon nanotubes, which are grown in a lab just outside of London.
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It's made from individual carbon nanotubes.
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Those carbon nanotubes like very, very long blades of grass.
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You imagine if you're a human walking around in grass 1000 ft tall, how little light would get down to you?
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It's kind of like that, but on a very, very tiny scale, it's pretty much like a a black hole.
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That's an interesting comparison, because this material is helping scientists peer deeper into the heavens than ever before.
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Acting a bit like a lens hood for a camera van to black basically prevents lens flares in powerful telescopes.
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Reducing that stray light allows us to see some of the faintest and most distant objects in the universe.
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So the closer we get to achieving absolute black, the more we're able to explore the blackness above.
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But space isn't the only frontier artists, designers and musicians want to get their hands on Vantaa Black.
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Asif Khan is covering a building inventor black for the 2018 Olympics.
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When people look at this building, they will see a sort of schism in space.
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It'll be like you're looking into the night sky.
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In fact, we're creating a kind of star fields within its blackness, so it will look like the Milky Way.
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But you'll be seeing it in broad daylight.
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The ability of anti black is to really make us think, Maura, about the light that we have access to it.
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It's got the ability to make us realize what a precious resources is.
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Mm.