(via TEDEd) A spy presses a button on their suit and blinks out of sight. A wizard wraps himself in a cloak and disappears. A star pilot flicks a switch, and their ship vanishes into space.

There’s something that some of us want to believe — something weird and wondrous and, to be frank, scary. We envision a world in which the sort of invisibility cloaks, the kind that appear in Harry ...

Magnetic invisibility sounds simple in theory. Place the right materials around an object and magnetic fields flow around it as if nothing were there. Reality has been far messier. For nearly two ...

Scientists have taken technology to a whole new level by bringing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak to life. Chu Junhao unveiled his invention at a virtual event called Super Night of Science in 2023, ...

Science and fiction always had a chicken and egg relationship: it’s hard to tell which one informs the other. Take invisibility, a fantastical notion brought into popular culture first by HG Wells’ ...

A researcher at the University of Texas at Austin has devised an invisibility cloak that could work over a broad range of frequencies, including visible light and microwaves. This is a significant ...

There’s a well-known story in Plato’s Republic in which a humble shepherd named Gyges finds a magical gold ring that renders whoever wears it invisible. Gyges proceeds to use his newfound power to ...

You know how a princess can feel a pea through 20 mattresses and 20 feather beds? Well, not any more. Researchers in Germany have created the first mechanical invisibility cloak. When this cloak is ...