The bad guys in Star Trek had cloaking devices; now the good guys can hide their space vessels in plain sight too.
Scientists in the UK and the US say cloaking devices could work if reseachers could develop "metamaterials" that would allow light waves to flow around objects instead of bouncing off of them, according to the BBC here.
"Water behaves a little differently to light. If you put a pencil in water that's moving, the water naturally flows around the pencil. When it gets to the other side, the water closes up," Professor John Pendry told the BBC.
"A little way downstream, you'd never know that you'd put a pencil in the water -- it's flowing smoothly again. Light doesn't do that of course, it hits the pencil and scatters. So you want to put a coating around the pencil that allows light to flow around it like water, in a nice, curved way."
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