Chinese Scientists Are Pretty Sure They're Close To Inventing An Invisibility Cloak

REUTERS/China DailyA woman laughs as she pushes a trolley past artist Liu Bolin during his demonstration to blend in with the vegetables on the shelves at a supermarket in Beijing, November 10, 2011.

For the past three years 40 research teams across China have been working on technology to make things invisible. Now the South China Morning Post reports that they're getting close.

From the SCMP:

The main approaches are developing materials that guide light away from an object, creating electromagnetic fields to bend light away from what one is trying to hide and copying nature to make hi-tech camouflage materials.

A team led by Professor Chen Hongsheng at Zhejiang University released a video last month demonstrating a device that made fish invisible. The same technology also apparently made a cat "disappear". The device was made of a hexagonal array of glass-like panels, which obscure the object from view by bending light around it.

One professor, Ma Yungui, an optical engineering specialist at Zhejiang University, thinks there's a 40% chance they'll nail it. He also said that it isn't hard to get funding for this kind of project in China. He's running into other mainland scientists at conferences all over the world.

Head to SCMP to find out more>