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China’s giant alien-hunting telescope is ready

Our alien-hunting game just got a lot stronger with the completion of a huge radio telescope in the Guizhou province of China. It’s called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), and it’s designed to listen for signs of alien life out in the cosmos. The telescope is finished, but the construction was not without human rights controversy.

Blackest coating on Earth is so hydrophobic it makes coins denser than water float

Scientists from Surrey Nanosystems - the British company that invented Vantablack back in 2014 - demonstrate how the material is somehow able to make an aluminium disk float in a tub of water.

As you can see in the footage, both the aluminium and the water aren’t particularly happy about the situation, because the water is doing everything it can to bulge up and over the aluminium, but the incredibly hydrophobic Vantablack coating keeps repelling it away.

The reason Vantablack can render a dense aluminium disk buoyant is because, not only is it incredibly black, it also has ultra-low surface energy

Composite Images of the London Blitz.