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Known as Quantum Stealth, the new invisibility cloak takes the form of a thin, inexpensive material that makes objects vanish from sight even though the background is still visible. The brainchild of Canadian camouflage design company Hyperstealth Biotechnology, the new material can conceal the presence of entire vehicles and could prove invaluable on the battlefield. It even works for non-visible wavelengths from mid- and near-ultraviolet to the infrared.

You might expect something called a deep-sea dragonfish to be a fearsome leviathan of the deep, dark ocean — and it is, if you happen to be one of the thumb-size ocean critters the dragonfish calls prey. Dragonfish (genus Aristostomias) are wee (only about 6 inches long), eel-like predators with massive, fang-lined jaws that can yawn open at 120-degree angles. These gaping chompers allow dragonfish to devour prey more than half of their size, but their hunting success also depends on another near-supernatural adaptation: invisibility. While dragonfish bodies give off a faint, bioluminescent glow, their teeth are almost completely transparent,...

WASHINGTON, DC – You might recall the films, The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains, and The Invisible Woman, starring Virginia Bruce. These works of fiction entertained audiences in the 1940s. But, it’s the 21st Century and it turns out invisible people really exist. “They live among us in the guise of senior citizens,” according to Dan Weber, president of AMAC, a powerful senior advocacy organization. San Francisco-based psychologist and psychotherapist Tamara McClintock Greenberg put it this way in an article for Psychology Today: “Why people are increasingly treated as if they’re invisible as they age (more prevalent it seems, for...

Inspired perhaps by Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, scientists have recently developed several ways—some simple and some involving new technologies—to hide objects from view. The latest effort, developed at the University of Rochester, not only overcomes some of the limitations of previous devices, but it uses inexpensive, readily available materials in a novel configuration. "There've been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn't there, often using high-tech or exotic materials," said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester....

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it. Similarly, tsunami waves could be bent around towns, and soundwaves bent around a room to make it soundproof. While the holy grail of metamaterials is still to make objects and people invisible to the eye, they are set to have a more tangible commercial impact playing more mundane roles – from satellite antennas to wirelessly charging cellphones. Metamaterials are simply materials that exhibit properties not found in nature, such as the way...

A bipartisan majority in the House voted to extend a bill banning plastic guns or other guns that would not be detectable in a metal detector or x-ray machine on Tuesday. The Undetectable Firearms Act, first passed in 1988 and renewed since, is set to expire on December 9. The act prohibits the manufacture, sale, or possession of firearms that do not contain enough metal to render them detectable by metal detectors and hence could be brought into airports or other secure places. The bill required a two-thirds majority to pass, and it passed easily by voice vote.

Washington -- It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker. Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible - his whole activity is. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/04/MNB01ML0O6.DTL#ixzz1idxOZQsa

A University of Texas scientist is working on developing a technology that would delight Harry Potter fans everywhere--an invisibility cloak. Ali Aliev uses carbon nanotubes--which look like pieces of thread--and then heats them up rapidly until the objects beneath them effectively disappear.You can watch the threads disappear as they are heated up in this video. So how do the threads work? In a paper published in Nanotechnology in June, Aliev explains that the invisibility cloak exploits the "mirage effect." A highway can become so hot that small circles that look like puddles of water appear in the road. That happens...

BAE Systems Conjures Up Invisibility Cloak (Source: BAE Systems; issued September 5, 2011) ÖRNSKÖLDSVIK, Sweden. --- BAE Systems has tested an ‘invisibility cloak’ that allows a vehicle to blend into its surroundings. The system, which can work over infra-red and other frequencies, will be displayed in infra-red mode on a BAE Systems CV90 armoured vehicle at the UK Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition later this month. Known as "Adaptiv", the patented technology is based on sheets of hexagonal 'pixels' that can change temperature very rapidly. On-board cameras pick up the background scenery and display that infra-red image on the...

With a new printing technique, researchers can now make enough metamaterials to begin fabricating invisibility cloaks and superlenses.A new printing method makes it possible to produce large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials designed to interact with light in ways no natural materials can. For several years, researchers working on these materials have promised invisibility cloaks, ultrahigh-resolution "superlenses," and other exotic optical devices straight from the pages of science fiction. But the materials were confined to small lab demonstrations because there was no way to make them in large enough quantities to demonstrate a practical device. "Everyone has,...

Russian design studio Art Lebedev calls this simple invention--a camera that takes images from the front of a truck to show it on screens in the back--Transparentius. I call it geeneeuzz. I don't know why the drawing below shows a tank at the front of the truck, but I guess that in Russia people drive T-90s like people drive Fords in the U.S. I wish the technology was so cheap that this could be implemented for real, because I'm sure being able to see what's in the blind zone before switching lanes would save a lot of lives on the

ScienceDaily (May 2, 2009) — The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view. A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak”...

If your superpower of choice would be to make things disappear, you may be surprised to see how close researchers are to making it come true. Our exclusive video, above, shows a device created at Duke University, North Carolina, that can make objects invisible to microwaves. The team thinks its technology could be modified to work for infrared and visible light too, making it able to hide 3D objects from human eyes. The way the device steers microwaves could also give a boost to wireless communications – improving signals indoors or underground, for example.

Researchers are cloaking materials from light, sound, and even matter itself. Two years ago a team of engineers amazed the world (Harry Potter fans in particular) by developing the technology needed to make an invisibility cloak. Now researchers are creating laboratory-engineered wonder materials that can conceal objects from almost anything that travels as a wave. That includes light and sound and—at the subatomic level—matter itself. And lest you think that cloaking applies only to the intangible world, 2008 even brought a plan for using cloaking techniques to protect shorelines from giant incoming waves. Engineer Xiang Zhang, whose University of California...

The creation of the magical technology has been the subject of intense research ever since Victorian author HG Wells captivated readers with his tales of a scientist who becomes invisible after consuming a cocktail of drugs. Now scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around three dimensional objects making them "disappear", according to an article on Nature magazine's website. The research, funded by the American military, paves the way for stealth tanks, aircraft and even warships that can disappear from enemy soldiers' sights. The technology works like water flowing around a...

A simple-to-make "superlens" can focus 10 times more sharply than a conventional lens. It could shrink the size of features on computer chips, or help power gadgets without wires. No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the "diffraction limit". This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips. Researchers have devised ways to beat the diffraction limit before, using bizarre "metamaterials" that are hard to make, and which are also the basis of prototype "invisibility cloaks"....

Scientists say they have finally come up with a workable design for an invisibility cloak. Physicists figured out the complex mathematical equations for making objects invisible by bending light around them last year. Now a group of engineers at Purdue University in Indiana have used those calculations to design a relatively simple device that ought to be able to - one day soon - make objects as big as an aeroplane simply disappear.

Durham, NC -- A team led by scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering has demonstrated the first working "invisibility cloak." The cloak deflects microwave beams so they flow around a "hidden" object inside with little distortion, making it appear almost as if nothing were there at all. Cloaks that render objects essentially invisible to microwaves could have a variety of wireless communications or radar applications, according to the researchers. The team reported its findings on Thursday, Oct. 19, in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science. The research was funded by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral...

A US-British team of scientists has successfully tested a cloak of invisibility in the laboratory. The device mostly hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in tests at Duke University, North Carolina. It works by deflecting the microwaves around the object and restoring them on the other side, as if they had passed through empty space. But making an object vanish before a person's eyes is still the stuff of science fiction - for now. We've opened the door into the secret garden Prof John Pendry, Imperial College London The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements...

Scientists Create Cloak of Partial Invisibility Ker ThanLiveScience Staff WriterLiveScience.com Thu Oct 19, 11:15 AM ET Scientists have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. To creatures or machines that see only in microwave light, the cloaked object would appear nearly invisible. ADVERTISEMENT "The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region," said study team member David Smith at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. "So it looks as if they just...