Slashdot Mirror
Making a Liquid Invisibility Cloak
Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, China are proposing a method which could lead to the first soft, tunable metamaterial, the key ingredient in building an invisibility device. "The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and colleagues, contains magnetite balls 10 nanometers in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometer-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping. In the absence of a magnetic field, such nanoparticles would simply float around in the water, but if a field were introduced, the particles would self-assemble into chains whose lengths depend on the strength of the field, and which can also attract one another to form thicker columns. The chains and columns would lie along the direction of the magnetic field. If they were oriented vertically in a pool of water, light striking the surface would refract negatively – bent in way that no natural material can manage."
It's been a while but isn't that a shot of Bacardi 151 mixed into a glass of ice tea garnished with a lime?
Oh ho ho ho ho!
I didn't see that one coming.
Did that joke have an invisibility cloak too?
I don't understand all these invisibility cloak stories on Slashdot over the years. Is it rooted in some fantasy about being invisible in the girl's locker room?
You can see through them with beer goggles.
Similarly, a hunk of silicon with strange electrical properties isn't a computer. And yet, the former is very useful if you want to build the latter.
Do you, like, just not understand how science works?
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
an SEP field is better anyway
I can understand how they could use these materials (theoretically anyway) to make Julian Beever-style illusions (see http://www.moillusions.com/2007/12/julian-beevers-new-3d-sidewalk.htm). But a real invisibility cloak has to detect the direction of every photon striking it and deliver that proton in the same direction out the exact opposite side of the cloak, doesn't it? Otherwise the effect is likely to be like a Beever painting, viewable from only one precise viewpoint.
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Theory blazes the trail, but it can't pave the road
We poured the material in a jar so that you could see the effects, but unfortunately we now seem to have misplaced it. We'll update as soon as we found it!
Apparently you saw right through that one.
It's impossible to actually create an SEP field, because of course the ideas, research and manufacture are all SEP !
I'll believe it when I see it.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
All that interesting information, and yet no car analogy. C-
We need some disambiguation, though. My "magic stick" seems to be very different than your "magic stick". Yours is likely black or silver; mine varies from light tan/pink to purplish. I'm sure there are other differences as well.
As a matter of fact, my "magic stick" is superior to yours, since I can cede control of it to my wife and still watch MST3K marathons.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Google up "pinhole camera" or "camera obscura" and you will see that we've had the technology to solve that part of the problem for close to a thousand years.
So sweet! Where can I get one of these new warp-capable cars??
"But this one goes to 11!"