Waves pass along the radial corridors, interacting with the pillars and producing forces that pull the water away from the innermost ring. The water is then pushed out of the cloaking area as if it had not encountered anything at all. The circular formation could be used to protect anything from oil rigs to islands, though very few islands can probably afford the amount of pillars needed to make this effect work. [New Scientist via Dvice]

But wait...apparently the anti-cloak can actually work to make the invisibility EVEN BETTER. OK, we're listening...

The flaw with the current (presumably scalable) methods of creating invisibility cloaks is that when the light bends around the user, that means the user is in complete darkness with no way to see the world outside.

Needless to say, this isn't what we had in mind at all.

With the anti-cloak, a tiny bit of the invisibility cloak could allow light in for a peep hole. And positioned correctly, such holes could usher in an entirely new era of espionage and/or lingerie. [ScienceDaily]

In layman's terms, the metamaterials developed by Zhang and his cohorts at UC Berkley scatter the visible light that hits them using a mixture of metal and circuit board materials like ceramic, Teflon and fiber composite. The scientists are using these materials to bend light around 3D objects, kind of like water around your ankles in a shallow river (yes, even cankles!), so they don't create reflections, shadows or Kevin Bacon impersonations.

More info on this latest invisibility discovery will be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science [The Associated Press]

The device works by redirecting light rays around the object and setting them back on path out the opposite end. So as far as one can tell, the light moves in a perfectly straight path instead of reflecting off the object as it normally would (or so our third grade science teacher would oversimplify the concept). And it's built from surprising materials: gold and plastic, arranged in concentric rings, granting them the ability to ripple/dominate light.

While the technology is not anticipated to work in three dimensions, the more depressing notion is that true invisibility is not at all possible, since even this solution would create a window glare effect. But fret not, readers, as other technologies are on the horizon. Their name? Nanocameras. [newscientist]

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

The authors of the study that posits the cloak say that "[They] will have a cloak after not too long." – John Biggs

Early 'Invisibility Cloak' Could Be 18 Months Away [CBS]

Invisibility Cloak [RealTechNews]