Coming soon: ‘Cloak of Illusion’ that disguises objects

September 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Two University of Alberta researchers have found that children's games like hide-and-seek could pave way for more realistic video games, and high-tech search-enhancing tools for the police. Experimental psychologist Marcia Spetch and computer scientist Vadim Bulitko used their research to understand the reasoning and decision-making process involved in hiding and searching for objects.

August 26th, 2009 LONDON - Tired of hopping from store to store to make relevant purchases? Well, a new three-dimensional printer would soon allow shoppers to customise their purchases in store. The printer, displayed at Science Museum in London, can create objects including a pen, a light and an orange squeezer from pieces of metal and plastic.

August 21st, 2009 LONDON - A University of St Andrews scientist has made fresh advancement in bringing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak closer to reality. Professor Ulf Leonhardt, who has won funding to develop a real version of the magical device, describes his work as the "ultimate optical illusion'.

August 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - It is now possible to bend the light along the corner of a building or even the profile of the eastern seaboard, for Boston College physicists have created a new metamaterial device that can guide electromagnetic waves around various objects. As directed by the researchers' novel device, these beams continue to behave as if travelling in a straight line.

July 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is introducing a new Web site that will provide a centralized resource for information on near-Earth objects - those asteroids and comets that can approach Earth. The "Asteroid Watch" site also contains links for the interested public to sign up for NASA's new asteroid widget and Twitter account.

July 28th, 2009 MOSCOW - The Russian navy has declassified its records of encounters with unidentified flying objects, popularly known as UFO's, which indicate that extraterrestrial intelligences like to stick to oceans while visiting Earth. According to a report in Russia Today, the records, dating back to soviet times, were compiled by a special navy group collecting reports of unexplained incidents delivered by submarines and military ships.

July 23rd, 2009 LONDON - A new computer simulation has suggested that millions of objects in the solar system's main asteroid belt may be icy interlopers from beyond Neptune that were flung into their present orbits after a violent migration of the giant planets. The solar system's main asteroid belt is a diverse mix of objects that orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

July 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research by scientists at the University of Liverpool has shown it is possible to develop an 'invisibility cloak' to protect buildings from earthquakes. Sebastien Guenneau, from the University's Department of Mathematics, developed the technology with Stefan Enoch and Mohamed Farhat from the Fresnel Institute (CNRS) in Marseilles.

July 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have come up with a device called a dc metamaterial, which makes objects invisible under certain light. The device does so, according to the researchers, under very low frequency electromagnetic waves by making the inside of the magnetic field zero, but not altering the exterior field.

July 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Florida Atlantic University engineers in Boca Raton are working on a superior new face recognition technique that can see through disguises. Lin Huang, from the university's Department of Engineering, says that every face has special features that define people, yet faces can also be very similar.

June 27th, 2009 LONDON - Let alone hiding persons or objects from prying eyes, future invisibility cloaks may even conceal buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, if physicists in France and the UK are to be believed. Stefan Enoch of the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, is the researcher behind the "earthquake cloak" idea.

June 17th, 2009 Washington, June 17 (ANI): A new study suggests that humans' expertise in recognising faces may be attributed to their tendency to see people and faces as individuals. Vanderbilt University researchers, who led the study, say that the same approach can be learnt and applied to other objects as well.

June 16th, 2009 LONDON - Magic carpets capable of hiding almost any object on earth may soon be a reality, with two separate research groups from the Berkeley-based University of California and New York-based Cornell University presenting interesting breakthroughs at the International Quantum Electronics Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, last week. "Carpet cloaks", which have sprung from the researchers' efforts, are being described as the first technology to succeed in hiding objects by deflecting light across a range of wavelengths.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions called supernovae in distant galaxies, variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way, and reveal new classes of astronomical objects. All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers.

June 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has revealed that sleep selectively preserves memories that are emotionally salient and relevant to future goals when sleep follows soon after learning. Lead author Dr Jessica Payne, of Harvard Medical School in Boston MA has revealed that sleeping brain seems to calculate what is most important about an experience and selects only what is adaptive for consolidation and long term storage.