New material to create invisibility cloak found
Actress Minnie Driver arrives at the premiere of 127 Hours in Beverly Hills, California on Wednesday. PHOTO: AP
Scientists are close to realising scientific fictional fantasies for real, and very soon. Teenage wizard Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, Spider-Man suit, Star Wars style 3-D holograms, flying cars could soon be reality as physicists around the world focus their research on objects inspired by fiction and fictional superheroes.
British scientists on Thursday announced that they have developed a flexible new material that could theoretically appear invisible to the naked eye.
As cloaks designed to shield objects from terahertz and near infrared waves have already been designed, physicists at St. Andrews’ University in Scotland have developed the metamaterial, which can create an independent, flexible material ideal for use in a wide range of applications, including the invisibility cloak.
“Metamaterials give us the ultimate handle on manipulating the behaviour of light. The impact of our new material Meta-flex is ubiquitous,” said Dr Andrea Di Falco, who led the research published in the New Journal of Physics. Flying cars, which are being developed by the United States military research agency, could be reality as soon as 2015. The flying cars will have advantages of a normal land transport vehicle and a helicopter.
It will be a “robust ground vehicle that can transform into an air vehicle with vertical take-off and landing capability,” US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has shortlisted six organisations for its 12-month effort, revealed in October.
Scientists in Italy are already working to develop carbon nanotube-based technology to make nano-molecular hooks and loops that would function like microscopic Velcro, which would help people walk on a high-rise building from outside or scale vertical walls like fictional superhero Spider-Man. Scientists in the US revealed that 3-D moving holograms are closer to reality after they developed a system that can transmit 3-D images in near real-time.
An Invisible Man, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, flying cars like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang maybe not part of our real world, however, their smart aids are close to reality.
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