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Harry Potter and Captain Kirk would be proud. A team of American and British researchers has made a Cloak of Invisibility. Well, OK, it's not perfect. Yet. But it's a start, and it did a pretty good job of hiding a copper cylinder from microwave detection. Like light and radar waves, microwaves bounce off objects making them visible and creating a shadow, though it has to be detected with instruments. And if you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar - a possibility that will fascinate the military - and likely from eyesight as well. Cloaking...

Harry Potter and his pals Ron and Hermione have been scooting undetected around Hogwarts for years beneath the invisibility cloak that Harry got from his murdered father, but now an international team of theoretical physicists suggests that muggles, or nonwizards, might someday make a cloak of their own. Reporting last week in the journal Science, physicists J.B. Pendry of Imperial College London and David Smith and David Schurig of Duke University described a way to make high-tech "metamaterials" that can funnel light around an object and make it invisible. Metamaterials, assemblages of small artificial bits of patterned metal films, can...