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Over the last few decades, cloaking devices have come closer and closer to becoming reality. Scientists have masked objects from the human eye using various metamaterials. They've created sonic invisibility barriers. They've even masked heat. And now they may be able to cloak a magnetic field, too. More »
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A functional invisibility cloak is one of those things that physicists keep chasing, and every six months or so we see an update that brings us one step closer to being able to sneak around without being seen. Today's major breakthrough comes from an undergraduate student at the University of St Andrews who figured out how to get around the fundamental problem of light taking too long to travel around the hidden object. More »
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Within the tight confines of a fiber-optic cable, some researchers at Cornell have managed to create an invisible flash of light. It's invisible not because the flash is manipulated to be hidden, but because the stretch of time during which it happened is erased by the time the flash gets to the other end of the cable. It has achieved temporal invisibility. More »
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Metamaterials have been used to make invisibility cloaks. To make an inaudibility cloak, all you need are some sheets of plastic and good mathematical modeling. More »
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We all know that superheroes like Superman or Thor are completely impossible. But just for the sake of argument, are there any superpowers that could actually exist in the real world? We assembled a panel of experts to find out. More »
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Invisibility cloaks are taking baby steps from science fiction to science fact. But there's an even stranger and more incredible possibility - an invisibility cloak that works in both space and time, shielding whole events from history itself. More »
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"Invisibility cloaks" have been in development for years, but keep hitting a major roadblock — the materials used absorb too much light. New research may have found the trick to get around that, and get us our cloaking devices. More »
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Invisibility cloaks took a step from science fiction to science fact this past weekend. A team of German scientists announced the construction of the first material that renders objects invisible in three dimensions. More »
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At last, you can make things disappear. Scientists have created a device for disappearing unwanted objects. The crazy part is that it can make objects seem to appear as well. More »
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Researchers claim that the creation of an invisibility cloak is feasible with future technology, and that soon humans could have the ability to blend in with their surroundings. Not content to wait for science to catch up with imagination, Dutch artist Desiree Palmen uses paint to camouflage her subjects, giving us a taste of what life will be like once invisibility becomes a reality. More »
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Cat's eyes look creepy because, at certain sudden angles, they reflect light directly back at you, the viewer. The ever-popular question of invisibility is wrapped up in that ability to reflect light at certain directions, commonly known as the refractive index. This week, two physicists from the UK and the Czech Republic published their method for designing optical singularities — in other words, refractive indices of either zero or infinity that could produce the wildest optical illusions we've ever seen. And that's just one of the ideas presented in the latest open-access issue of the New Journal of Physics on cloaking and transformation optics. More »
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Invisibility used to be the stuff of comic books and Harry Potter novels. But this week, scientists from UC Berkeley have emerged with two new invisibility-producing "metamaterials," engineered substances that bend electromagnetic waves in ways they've never bent before. They call it "negative refraction." But you and I can just call it the first step towards invisible armor. We talked to one of the Berkeley scientists involved, and got the scoop. More »
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Meet the first (semi) invisible warship: it's painted in "low reflectivity" materials that make it hard to see on radar. While not invisible to the naked eye, this Swedish ship, called the Visby Corvette, is for all intents and purposes invisible to many of the instruments Navies would use to pick it up. Researchers say the next generation of high-stealth ships like this might be invisible to the naked eye, too. Want to see more of this invisible ship? More »
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Last year, a team at Duke announced a beta cloaking material whose special nano-properties make it "invisible" to microwaves. Today, however, researchers in Stuttgart have got something even better — a "metamaterial" that can cloak objects in the visible light spectrum. Made of gold nano-mesh, the material has a negative refraction index for visible light — that means it doesn't reflect light, and could give the illusion of blending into the background. I can't wait for my metamaterial full body suit for doing futuristic spy shit. Towards Cloaking Visible Light [Science Daily] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=337405&view=rss&microfeed=true Math geeks at University of Rochester say it's theoretically possible to create a wormhole between two locations. The beauty part is that you'd be invisible while you travel between them. The tech you'd use to do this sounds a little like Philip K. Dick's "scramble suit" from A Scanner Darkly. "Metamaterials" that bend electromagnetic fields would create a space from which light couldn't escape, thus making you effectively invisible as you "tunneled" to another spot. When are they going to start selling this at Radio Shack?
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