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Physicists Devise Magnetic Shield
sciencehabit writes "The sneaky science of 'cloaking' just keeps getting richer. Physicists and engineers had already demonstrated rudimentary invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, and water waves. Now, they've devised an 'antimagnet' cloak that can shield an object from a constant magnetic field without disturbing that field. If realized, such a cloak could have medical applications, researchers say."
Well, it says constant magnetic field. That's pretty hard to generate, since lots of things cause magnetic fields to fluctuate (including body movement of a metal object).
TLDR version of TFA:
The hypothetical device would work as a magnetic cloak by creating a space that is protected from an external magnetic field while at the same time causing no telltale distortion of the field. Alternatively, it could also be used to conceal a magnetic object and prevent its magnetic field from extending out into space—
So, yeah, if made portable enough it would be a security problem. But don't hold your breath.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Forget the actual medical applications. The applications for pseudo medicine are just as good. There are already a ton of people sleeping on magnetic mats. They would eat this up. Maybe even literally.
Everything you said is true, but all those methods of shielding an enclosed space can be detected from outside the space by the resulting warp in the fields around it. The researchers in this article propose a method of layering materials so that the warping of the field is contained within the shield itself, rendering its presence undetectable. This is a significant advance over conventional shielding, but it has yet to be proven feasible.
Landmines. Right now, they use a bare minimum of metal to evade metal detectors, so everything is mechanical. This would allow a processor and such to be in the mine so you could have it not detonate on friendlies, and deactivate itself/start beeping after a couple years. Heck, you could even have the mines networked so the whole field detonates simultaneously when it detects large number of troops are half-way across. I'm not sure if it's in the best interest of humanity to revisit this technology, but at least some of their tactical and humanitarian problems can be addressed.