cloaking

Researchers are taking the notion of a light-deflecting "invisibility cloak" into the realm of heat.

A paper in the journal Optics Express yesterday describes a method to control the diffusion of heat similar to how researchers cloak objects to render them invisible.

By controlling how heat flows, the paper's authors intend to build materials that keep electronics cool or concentrate heat for solar power generation. Prototype thermal cloaks for microelectronics are expected to be ready within months.

In the past few years, researchers have made advances in specialized materials that scatter light, sound, or seismic waves which … Read more

Crucial structures such as power plants and dams could be protected from earthquakes by surrounding them with specially designed rubber cylinders, according to researchers.

A team from the University of Manchester's School of Mathematics yesterday proposed creating barriers that would "cloak" buildings from the seismic waves of earthquakes. The researchers applied the same techniques that others have on scattering waves of light to render objects invisible.

In a paper published last week, the researchers say that artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, have the potential to safeguard critical buildings and other structures such as airport terminals and bridges … Read more

It's not quite the Invisible Man, but researchers say they have gotten a step closer to creating a "three-dimensional cloak" that would render objects invisible.

Scientists at the University of Texas in Austin today said they have hidden a cylinder from microwaves, demonstrating cloaking of an object in free space, rather than a two-dimensional image. The group has not been able to scatter visible light, but it expects that cloaking small objects is possible.

"Cloaking small objects may be exciting for a variety of applications. For instance, we are currently investigating the application of these concepts … Read more

Think of all the things you wish you'd never seen happen.

Your auntie making that speech at Thanksgiving dinner about birds, bees, and Bieber. Your lover accusing you of infidelity with an alien. Every last minute of "From Justin to Kelly."

Well, now some very clever Cornell people want to offer you hope, mingled with fact.

Research published in Nature magazine, helpfully translated by the Associated Press, declares that these scientists successfully managed to time-cloak an event--so that, to naked and disbelieving eyes, it never happened.

They say they did it by interrupting the light flow in … Read more

Those obsessed with where Google ranks their Web site have a new topic to mull over: cloaking.

Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users. This can include "serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users," according to Google's Webmaster Central help pages, … Read more

Once or twice a year, we bring all you "Harry Potter" fans news of yet another invisibility cloak under development. So it is that we return with word of another scientist promising to help you perform your wizardry in secret.

This time, it's Elena Semouchkina who's venturing into H.G. Wells territory. An associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech University, Semouchkina has found a way to use magnetic resonance to route rays of light around objects, making the objects undetectable by the human eye.

Other researchers have bent visible light using things … Read more

It came too late for Jesse James. There was a time, indeed, when John Edwards might have found it very useful, but that time has surely passed.

In life, timing is everything. So while researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany claim that they have made a breakthrough in invisible-cloak technology, there are far too many mortal souls who can only wish that they would hurry up.

According to the Associated Press, the German scientists managed to successfully hide from greedy eyes a tiny bump in a layer of gold.

When I say "tiny," I mean 0.… Read more

I've missed taking some shots because I was busy wrangling my camera out from my bag. It's times like this I wished someone had thought of the Cloak Bag earlier. The bottom of the pouch is zippered, so you just have to undo this to reveal the lens. Openings at the side of the holder allow you to access the camera's grip and zoom ring around the optics.

Do note that the bag is only 9.25 inches tall, so not all lenses can be secured within the Cloak Bag. You'll also have to use the … Read more

Alli (aka Heavy from the old days) joins us on today's show and as usual, she brings up the wackiest topics. Today's tangents include Halloween costume ideas, time travel, and super powers...oh, and some stories from the Internet, too!

We always love having Alli on the show because she always brings up the weirdest topics of discussion. Case in point: Halloween costumes...it's the end of August! It's going to be hard to top last year's costumes but Alli has a great idea for a DOUBLE costume: Jon & Kate Plus 8--it's the perfect costume for us, aside from the fact that we'd have to stand next to each other all night and somehow abduct eight babies. This might be our last Halloween.

Next, we move onto a rundown of 10 joke technologies that sort of became real, but we actually only get into the invisibility cloak before getting sidetracked into our most desired super power. Jeff wishes he had the power to tan, I go with the ability to morph into a potted plant, and Alli just wishes she could get out of The 404 studio.

Plenty of more stories to get to, but don't just read about them here, listen to the show! We've got Bob Dylan voicing a GPS system (replete with our awful impersonations), the UK's disturbingly graphic "texting while driving" PSA, and Microsoft's tasteless Photoshop incident. You don't want to miss this episode!.