Researchers at the University of British Columbia leveraged an unusual discovery into ultra-black material made from wood. The deep, dark black is not the result of any sort of dye or surface coating; it’s structural change to the wood itself that causes it to swallow up at least 99% of incoming light.

The discovery was partially accidental, as researchers happened upon it while looking at using high-energy plasma etching to machine the surface of wood in order to improve it’s water resistance. In the process of doing so, they discovered that with the right process applied to the right thickness and orientation of wood grain, the plasma treatment resulted in a surprisingly dark end result. Fresh from the plasma chamber, a wood sample has a thin coating of white powder that, once removed, reveals an ultra-black surface.

The resulting material has been dubbed Nxylon (the name comes from mashing together Nyx, the Greek goddess of darkness, with xylon the Greek word for wood) and has been prototyped into watch faces and jewelry. It’s made from natural materials, the treatment doesn’t create or involve nasty waste, and it’s an economical process. For more information, check out UBC’s press release.

You have probably heard about Vantablack (and how you can’t buy any) and artist Stuart Semple’s ongoing efforts at making ever-darker and accessible black paint. Blacker than black has applications in optical instruments and is a compelling thing in the art world. It’s also very unusual to see an ultra-black anything that isn’t the result of a pigment or surface coating.

To be clear, when we are talking about tubes, we mean ordinary cylinders, not vacuum-amplifying elements. With that out of the way, when we need a tube like that, we usually think of PVC or some other kind of pipe product. Or maybe we’ll 3D print what we need. But not [GregO29]. He made his tubes from plywood.

You can make tubes as small as 12 inches in diameter, and [GregO29] made some that were 16 inches. The first step was to make a mold or form. In this case, he elected to make a form that the tube-to-be wraps around. The plywood is thin 2-ply white birch. This makes it easy to shape.

The basic idea is to wrap the wood around the form and glue it. You hold it together with a strap until it dries. Then, you can add more layers until it is the thickness you need.

The real problem turned out to be removing the form once it was done. Why make a tube like this? In [Greg]’s case, he’s building a telescope, which is as good a reason as any to have a tube, we suppose.

We build a lot of things, but we always forget about plywood. It even mixes well with electricity.

Can you weld wood? It seems like a silly question — if you throw a couple of pieces of oak on the welding table and whip out the TIG torch, you know nothing is going to happen. But as [Action Lab] shows us in the video below, welding wood is technically possible, if not very practical.

Since experiments like this sometimes try to stretch things a bit, it probably pays to define welding as a process that melts two materials at their interface and fuses them together as the molten material solidifies. That would seem to pose a problem for wood, which just burns when heated. But as [Action Lab] points out, it’s the volatile gases released from wood as it is heated that actually burn, and the natural polymers that are decomposed by the heat to release these gases have a glass transition temperature just like any other polymer. You just have to heat wood enough to reach that temperature without actually bursting the wood into flames.

His answer is one of the oldest technologies we have: rubbing two sticks together. By chucking a hardwood peg into a hand drill and spinning it into a slightly undersized hole in a stick of oak, he created enough heat and pressure to partially melt the polymers at the interface. When allowed to cool, the polymers fuse together, and voila! Welded wood. Cutting his welded wood along the joint reveals a thin layer of material that obviously underwent a phase change, so he dug into this phenomenon a bit and discovered research into melting and welding wood, which concludes that the melted material is primarily lignin, a phenolic biopolymer found in the cell walls of wood.

[Action Lab] follows up with an experiment where he heats bent wood in a vacuum chamber with a laser to lock the bend in place. The experiment was somewhat less convincing but got us thinking about other ways to exclude oxygen from the “weld pool,” such as flooding the area with argon. That’s exactly what’s done in TIG welding, after all.