Through a fairly low power laser process some clever folks over at the University of Rochester have come up with a way to generate an intrinsic colored surface on metals. They can even get an extremely pure black. Why is this cool? For the Clock of the Long Now project we are always on the lookout for ways of coloring metal for parts of the clock in ways that wont fail over time. A process like this could be used on the dials, or even on metals that we need to absorb sunlight to give us temperature variation.
