Invisible cloak sort of kind of makes things harder to see

It’s the eternal dilemma: if you could only have one, which would you choose: flight or invisibility? Me, I’ve always been kind of a stealth sort of guy (excluding the Jamie Foxx/Josh Lucas/Jessica Biel debacle of last year), so I’ll have to put a tick in the invisible box—which, come to think of it, would make it rather a hard box to tick.

While invisibility from the naked eye is probably still some time away, scientists have come up with a variety of stealth technologies. For example, the kind featured on the F-117 fighter and the B-2 bomber, that makes them much more difficult to detect with radar.

Now Duke University scientists have managed to make an object mostly invisible to detection by microwaves . Even in this case, “invisible” may be a strong word—the device made it harder to detect the object.

The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements. This is classed as a “metamaterial” – an artificial composite that can be engineered to produce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves.

As opposed to stealth technology, which involves reducing the cross section of a plane to make it more difficult to detect, this “cloaking” technology could actually make it possible to hide an aircraft from radar. No doubt some tasty military funding will be coming down the pipeline. I just hope this bodes well for my future invisibility cloak.