Coolest Invention in the Last 10 Years

I don't know how practical this invention is, but it's so freaking cool that it doesn't even matter: science researchers at Berkeley and University of California Berkeley have created their own Invisibility Cloak out of nanostructured silicon that deflects light and conceals bulges. "Shining a beam of light on the bulge shows a reflection identical to that of a beam reflected from a flat surface, meaning the object itself has essentially been rendered invisible." The research team is led by Xiang Zhang, director of UC Berkeley's Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center. "Even with the advances that have been made in optical metamaterials, scaling sub-wavelength metallic elements and placing them in an arbitrarily designed spatial manner remains a challenge at optical frequencies.”

Zhang's cloak is made from dielectric materials, not metallic metamaterials. With the metallic metamaterials, Zhang's team demonstrated that light can be "bent backwards," a property UNPRECEDENTED IN NATURE. With the dielectric materials, optical cloaking occurred in two dimensions - light was confined to the vertical dimension but free to propagate in the other two. Zhang is confident that in the future they can design materials for optical cloaking from visible light - in other words, true invisibility.

Funding for this research was provided for, big surprise, the U.S. military. So they'll be using sweet invisibility cloaking to kill people...which is pretty cool.