Scientists just got closer to developing a real-life invisibility cloak — and it looks nothing like Harry Potter's cape.
Researchers from Iowa State University have developed a flexible, stretchable material that reportedly allows those who wear it to evade radar detectors, Discovery News reports.
According to a paper the team published February 23 in the journal Scientific Reports, the silicon material can be seen by the naked human eye, but can evade detection by radar, which finds objects by shooting pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic waves at them and then recording the signal that bounces back. The silicon material features embedded rings of a metal alloy called galinstan, which can block specific radar pings by absorbing them, depending upon how the material is stretched.
If it works how the researchers say it does, it could cloak stealth aircraft, making them harder to detect by radar.
The researchers report that the material only absorbs 75% of the light in certain radar frequency ranges, but the material could one day make objects completely invisible.
Making large objects invisible to both radar detectors and the naked eye would require more advances in nanomaterials, which are made from microscopic items in labs, the researchers say.
Scientists seem to be getting closer. As reported by Tech Insider's Julia Calderone, the most promising designs involve the manipulation of light.
We see objects because visible light bounces off them and back into our eyeballs. An invisibility cloak could completely bypass this by making light wavelengths wrap around an object, Calderone reported, tricking the brain into thinking it isn't there.
For example, last year, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley developed an ultra-thin, light-absorbing material that can apparently hide small objects from the human eye.
Since both innovations involve more of a stretchable, skin-like material than a Hogwarts-esque cloak, perhaps we would need to make an invisibility bodysuit to hide a human.
