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“From Tolkien’s ring of power in The Lord of the Rings to Star Trek’s Romulans, who could make their warships disappear from view, from Harry Potter’s magical cloak to the garment that makes players vanish in the video game classic Dungeons and Dragons, the power to turn someone or something invisible has fascinated mankind. But who ever thought that a scientist at Michigan Technological University would be serious about building a working invisibility cloak?

That’s exactly what Elena Semouchkina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech, is doing. She has found ways to use magnetic resonance to capture rays of visible light and route them around objects, rendering those objects invisible to the human eye.

Semouchkina and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is also an adjunct professor, recently reported on their research in the journal Applied Physics Letters, published by the American Institute of Physics. Her co-authors were Douglas Werner and Carlo Pantano of Penn State and George Semouchkin, who works at Michigan Tech and Penn State.

They describe developing a nonmetallic cloak that uses identical glass resonators made of chalcogenide glass, a type of dielectric material (one that does not conduct electricity). In computer simulations, the cloak made objects hit by infrared waves—approximately one micron or one-millionth of a meter long—disappear from view.

Earlier attempts by other researchers used metal rings and wires. “Ours is the first to do the cloaking of cylindrical objects with glass,” Semouchkina said.”

Read more at Physorg

“Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we’d spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we’d be far happier. That’s according to Christopher Hsee and colleagues, who say we’re happier when busy but that unfortunately our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing – an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

Consider Hsee’s first study. His team offered 98 students a choice between delivering a completed questionnaire to a location that was a 15-minute round-trip walk away, or delivering it just outside the room and then waiting 15 minutes. A twist was that either the same or different types of chocolate snack bar were offered as a reward at the two locations.

If the same snack bar was offered at both locations then the majority (68 per cent) of students chose the lazy option, delivering the questionnaire just outside the room. By contrast, if a different (black vs. white) bar was offered at each location then the majority (59 per cent) chose the far away ‘busy’ option. This was the case even though earlier research showed both snack bar options were equally appealing, and even though the location of the two snack bar types was counterbalanced across participants. In other words, Hsee said, the students’ instinct was for idleness, but when they were given a specious excuse for walking further, most of them took the busy option. Crucially, when asked afterwards, the students who’d taken the walk reported feeling significantly happier than the idle students, consistent with Hsee’s theory that we’re happier when busy (a repeat of the study in which students were allocated without choice to the idle or busy condition led to the same outcome – the busier students felt happier).”

Read more at BPS Research Digest

“It will be harder to lie about your age or your poker hand after new research by the University of Melbourne, Australia has revealed that our eye position betrays the numbers we are thinking about.

In the study, participants were asked to state a series of random numbers. By measuring their vertical and horizontal eye position, researchers were able to predict with reliable confidence the next chosen number — before it was spoken. Specifically, a leftward and downward change in eye position announced that the next number would be smaller than the last. Correspondingly, if the eyes changed position to the right and upward, it forecast that the next number would be larger. The degree of eye movement reflected the size of the numerical shift.

The paper was published online in the journal Current Biology. First author, Dr Tobias Loetscher of the University of Melbourne’s School of Behavioural Sciences and previously of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland says the research demonstrates how the eyes and their position give insight into the nature of the systematic choices made by the brain’s random number generator.”

Read more at Science Daily