For nearly 20 years, physicists and engineers have chased the idea of invisibility. Early efforts focused on hiding objects from light using so-called metamaterials with extreme and often unrealistic ...

(via TEDEd) A spy presses a button on their suit and blinks out of sight. A wizard wraps himself in a cloak and disappears. A star pilot flicks a switch, and their ship vanishes into space.

Magnetic invisibility sounds simple in theory. Place the right materials around an object and magnetic fields flow around it as if nothing were there. Reality has been far messier. For nearly two ...

Twenty years ago, a Duke University professor, David R. Smith, used artificial composite materials called “metamaterials” to make a real-life invisibility cloak. While this cloak didn’t really work ...

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 ...

There’s something that some of us want to believe — something weird and wondrous and, to be frank, scary. We envision a world in which the sort of invisibility cloaks, the kind that appear in Harry ...

You know how a princess can feel a pea through 20 mattresses and 20 feather beds? Well, not any more. Researchers in Germany have created the first mechanical invisibility cloak. When this cloak is ...

Chinese physicists have created an illusory, ghosting invisibility cloak -- a cloak that changes the appearance of an object so that it looks like something else. In theory, you could cover a soldier ...