Melanin — and specifically, the form called eumelanin — is the primary pigment that gives humans the coloring of their skin, hair, and eyes. It protects the body from the hazards of ultraviolet and other radiation that can damage cells and lead to skin cancer, but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery. Now researchers at MIT and other institutions have solved that mystery, potentially opening the way for the development of synthetic materials that could have similar light-blocking properties. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Communications by graduate students Chun-Teh Chen and Chern Chuang, professor of civil and environmental engineering Markus Buehler, and three others. Although eumelanin has been known for decades, pinning down its molecular structure, and identifying the reasons for its broadband light absorption, have been daunting tasks. This is, in part, because of the very characteristics that make it so interesting: Typically, the constituents of a chemical compound can be determined through spectroscopy, among other tools, but in the case of eumelanin the spectrographs don’t show the sharp peaks that are ordinarily useful in identification. So indirect means
The post Why eumelanin is such a good absorber of light has been published on Technology Org.
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