Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".
The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.
The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.
The findings, by scientists led by Xiang Zhang, were published in the journals Nature and Science.
The new system works like water flowing around a rock, the researchers said.
Because light is not absorbed or reflected by the object, a person only sees the light from behind it - rendering the object invisible.
The new material produces has "negative refractive" properties. It has a multi-layered "fishnet" structure which is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths.
The research, funded by the US government, could one day be used in military stealth operations - with tanks made to disappear from the enemies' sight.
In recent months, I have been made aware of two such instances of this scientific rumor mill. In May of this year, I received an e-mail from someone describing himself as a cancer researcher who wanted to know why I was ignoring the proven danger of cell phones: My colleagues in Sweden and Japan tell me that exposure to microwave radiation from cell phones are potentially dangerous -- and that this should be acknowledged by the phone companies which they don t bother acknowledging . He went on to describe his colleagues experiments with mice in RF fields that had increased incidence of brain tumors. I found the description of this research to be surprising, since no such research has appeared recently in the scientific literature.
In July of this year, a more extreme example of the same type of underground science hit the news. Dr Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, circulated a memo to 3000 faculty and staff members at his Institute, warning them that children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing. He also said that everyone should keep the phone away from their heads and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset. He even warned against using cell phones in public places because it exposes others.
On what does Dr. Herberman base this warning? Early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science. Really, at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe, rather than sorry later, he stated.
When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Zaret s main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic Unchained >Melody for the 1955 movie Unchained , later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in Ghost . Three of the albums the best three in my opinion were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself he wrote On Top of Spaghetti .
The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.
In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps about half a megabyte each or 160 Kbps about two megabytes each . The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.
The LIFE SIZE MOUSETRAP is a fantastically hand crafted, 16 piece 50,000-lb. interactive KINETIC SCULPTURE set atop a 6,500-square-foot, 2,000-lb GAME BOARD.
This giant Rube Goldberg style contraption comes complete with a VAUDEVILLIAN style show, original MUSICAL SCORE by The one woman band Esmerelda Strange, Sexy Mice CAN-CAN DANCERS, Clown workers, acrobatic HI JINKS, and other SPECTACULAR SCENES dedicated to the pursuit of spectacle laden FUN!
Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind (video)
Topic: Science
3:07 am EDT, Apr 15, 2008
Clifford Stoll could talk about the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or hunting KGB hackers. Or Klein bottles, computers in classrooms, the future. But he's not going to. Which is fine, because it would be criminal to confine a man with interests as multifarious as Stoll's to give a talk on any one topic. Instead, he simply captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides -- and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he's a scientist: "Once I do something, I want to do something else."
Sci/Tech Heads need to watch this... It fun and a great video!
Why are we not teaching science like this? I want to sit in on his class!
Each month a new molecule will be added to the list on this page. The links will take you to a page at one of the Web sites at a University Chemistry Department or commercial site in the UK, the US, or anywhere in the world, where useful (and hopefully entertaining!), information can be found about a particularly interesting molecule.
neuroscientist Jill Taylor describes her stroke from the perspective of...a neuroscientist. quite fascinating and moving, although it sounds a lot like an acid trip...click below ::
Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. If your group has moderate programming, web, sysadmin, and hardware resources, you can use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project. With a single Linux server you can get the computing power of thousands of CPUs. Organizations such as IBM World Community Grid may be able to host your project (please contact us for information). Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center. Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Like distributed.net but putting it to good use... Lets see if we could get a memestreams user grid going... Tom had some kinda of idea going around....
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classic combinatorial problem: given a set of cities, what is the path that visits each city once and only once, while covering the minimum distance?
For a small set of cities, the solution is trivial and can be discovered by simple inspection; however, the solution for even a moderate number of cities is out of reach for most home computers. For example, to exhaustively check all possible paths for a 48 city instance—assuming you could check one million paths a second—would take approximately 1047 years.
Despite all the research, there is still no known general solution to the TSP.
Forget me not: brain scans on a grid for Alzheimer's diagnosis
Topic: Science
12:31 am EDT, Mar 10, 2008
Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease relies on access to a distributed collection of treasured data. Now, a team of Italian scientists is creating a way for hospitals to share these data jewels.
“We had doctors with a real-world problem—they were not able to share data,” says Ivan Porro of the University of Genova, Italy. “With distributed data resources, this is intrinsically a grid problem.”
