Duke Cloaking Device-Builder Announces: I'm Behind You... RIGHT NOW...

As my brother Zac notes, "holy shit. we must get our hands on these projects."

From Kenneth Chang's "Light Fantastic: Flirting With Invisibility," in today's New York Times:

[Picture caption:] Duke researchers built a simplified version of their cloaking device out of copper rings and wires patterned onto fiberglass sheets and demonstrated that it successfully diverted microwaves.

Increasingly, physicists are constructing materials that bend light the "wrong" way, an optical trick that could lead to sharper-than-ever lenses or maybe even make objects disappear.

Last October, scientists at Duke demonstrated a working cloaking device, hiding whatever was placed inside, although it worked only for microwaves.

In the experiment, a beam of microwave light split in two as it flowed around a specially designed cylinder and then almost seamlessly merged back together on the other side. That meant that an object placed inside the cylinder was effectively invisible. No light waves bounced off the object, and someone looking at it would have seen only what was behind it.

I needn't point out to you good dames and gents that this is fucking amazing. Soon we will have personal cloaking devices, anti-cloaking scanners, and invisi-cats (who will take petite but hard to find invisi-poops).

[Non-poop-related] downsides: Invisi-rapists, invisi-tanks, invisi-slippery banana peels.

Upsides: You will not see me walking around my apartment in my underwear, Bushwick.