But even apart from cloaking devices, the metamaterial techniques being studied have other applications, including fiberoptics.
FORBES: Duke Researchers Perfect The Original Invisibility Cloak
In recent years, a number of research efforts has demonstrated a wide range of cloaking techniques.
Lawyers familiar with bankruptcy proceedings said that isn't a legal basis for cloaking a lawsuit in secrecy.
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That said, the spinoffs from this cloaking research as the potential to improve a lot of industries.
FORBES: Duke Researchers Perfect The Original Invisibility Cloak
Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.
Cloaking relies on guiding light waves such that waves from a hidden object do not reach the eye.
Sturdy brands see benefits in positioning themselves against cloaking and in advocating disclosure.
Still on the drawing board, in the form of an unpublished paper, is cloaking buildings and dams from seismic waves.
But microwaves are important in many applications, principally telecommunications and radar, and improved versions of cloaking could vastly improve microwave performance.
Then there is the persistent urban myth that MF Global had a cloaking device that misfired and destroyed the firm.
The Action phase allows certain ships, items, and crewmembers to perform useful actions such as ship repairs, cloaking, and employing tractor beams.
"What's stopping him by coming out and out rightly apologising and saying that, if that's what he means, otherwise he's just cloaking it, " she said.
You see, much of the mathematics behind cloaking (called "transformation optics") applies just the same - and is likely to find quicker application - in other contexts.
The official color of the sanitation worker's uniform is "spruce, " and in my duties with the department, I discovered that the outfit acts as a cloaking device.
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That undermines the traditional practice of billing high hourly rates for any work done by a person with a law degree, and cloaking the actual economic costs from the client and the firm itself.
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Critics of the Muslim Brotherhood, and indeed Tunisia's Ennahda, claim that they do really harbour the goal of an Islamic state but are cloaking this ambition in ambiguity as a matter of political expediency.
Recent discoveries revealed that tumors are adept at cloaking themselves by hijacking the body's own mechanism for preventing the system's T-cells, the infection- and disease-fighting cells of the immune system, from running amok against healthy tissue.
Now, Dr Cummer and his colleagues have shown off an acoustic cloaking technique that works in air, for audible frequencies between one and four kilohertz - corresponding to two octaves on the higher half of a piano.
"How the sound reflects off this reflecting surface with this composite object on it - which is pretty big and has a cloaking shell on it - really reflects... just like a flat surface does, " Dr Cummer said.
But the story's visceral appeal presents a problem for those who contend that the novel's poetic language and resonant imagery are merely cloaking devices for what amounts to a thin, lurid storyline that would barely pass muster in a bottom-feeding pulp magazine.
In 2008, Dr Cummer first described the theory of acoustic cloaking in an article in Physical Review Letters, and earlier this year a group from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrated the first practical use of the theory in an article in the same journal.
The key change was the addition of copper strips to the metamaterial that shields an object from incoming light to create a better material, couple with a slight change in its orientation to solve a problem caused by dividing the metamaterial of the cloaking device into quadrants.
FORBES: Duke Researchers Perfect The Original Invisibility Cloak
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