Blackbirds, it turns out, aren’t actually all that black. Their feathers absorb most of the visible light that hits them, but still reflect between 3 and 5 percent of it. For really black ...

"What we found was that the feather was predicted to be black with 95 percent certainty," Carney said. To better pin down the structure of the feather, they analyzed its barbules — tiny ...

Tilted, microscopic filaments in some of the showy birds’ black feathers make that plumage look much darker than traditional black feathers, researchers report online January 9 in Nature ...

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