1. Super-black feathers with Dakota McCoy

Super-black materials are blacker than black - they are so good at capturing light that almost no light escapes them. While a normal black object still reflects some light, which allows you to see the shape of the object, super-black objects appear almost shapeless. You can see this in objects covered by a human-made super-black material, Vantablack. But how do birds produce super-black colors? And why do they produce them? What can engineers learn from nature’s way of making super-black? To answer these questions, I talk to Dakota (Cody) McCoy, who discovered super-black bird plumage while being a student at Yale University. Cody is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and she’s interested in how nature have come up with clever ways to modify light, and what we can learn from nature in developing new materials. If you want to learn more about super-black feathers, head over to the show website at klaranorden.com/specimenstories. Music from https://pixabay.com/music/ and https://www.purple-planet.com.