When you rub your hands together to create friction and warmth, heat energy radiating off your hand creates air currents. They’re completely invisible to the human eye, but with a simple setup, it turns out your digital camera can reveal this invisible world around us.
It’s called the Schlieren effect and it means that you can see stuff that’s invisible to the human eye, like changes in air density. So when you turn on a hair dryer, you can see the blast of air it shoots out. When you open a can of Coke, you can see what’s escaping into the air. When you rub your hands, you can see…
It’s called Invisible ... any guesses? The show’s logline is amusingly vague, referencing only a NYC family that built an empire thanks to a certain “extraordinary ability” passed down through generations. Based on the title, we’re probably not talking time travel, super strength, or flight.
Invisibility is perhaps the most ubiquitous of sci-fi dreams: Spy movies, video games, and classic cartoons all tantalize us with this trick. Researchers at the University of Rochester still haven't unlocked the secret to that elusive invisibility cloak either, I'm afraid. But they made a very cool optical illusion…
You're looking at a new awesome nano-material invented that does the seemingly impossible: It hides things from touch. Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch. In this photo you can see how it "absorbs" a metal cylinder.
Okay, so you know your hand? Five fingers. Assorted grasping and carrying shenanigans. Right. So it turns out that your brain is constantly using sensory information to check in and make sure it still knows what's your hand and what's not. And it can be fooled.
Lynx, the spray deodorant company, turned windows of a house in Sydney into a series of sexy and steamy behavior. The trick was that you could only peak at the sexy scenes with special polarized glasses, it was unseen and invisible to the naked eye.
Come on, already. You know that fancy away message isn't going to protect you. You can sass it up with as much urgency and/or bile as you want, but the yo-yos are still going to come knocking. And you know what? It's your own fault for not doing an Invisible ninja vanish when you had the chance. [The Doghouse Diaries]
Cylon raider? A new Tron vehicle that we'll see in an upcoming director's cut? Definitive proof that we are not alone? Actually, it's none of those things, but the dead silence it produces is amazing anyway.
The Invisibility app is indeed magical. It takes a mediocre camera on your iPad 2 and turns it into something incredible.
Your pervy, Harry Potter-fueled dreams are edging closer to reality, now British scientists have used metamaterials to bend light in a different manner to previous attempts. Now, it works with a greater range of colors.
Everyone's trying to fix the iPhone 4's attenuation problem! Best Buy is reportedly giving away free invisibleSHIELDs to any unhappy iPhone 4 owner. Meaning you didn't even have to buy your iPhone 4 from Best Buy to take advantage. UPDATED
Invisibility cloak project is back on! It's from a different team of scientists that were using silver-plated nanoparticles in water though, with these latest Harry Potter enthusiasts using photonic metamaterials to change light rays.
Want to make your car invisible? It's an expensive and possibly impossible task, unless you want to get creative with it.
Japan's been tooling around with versions of invisibility cloaks for years now, but they seem to have finally perfected it. Theoretically. By using "left-handed metamaterials" to make electromagnetic control devices, researchers can generate lenses that either reflect no light or have a perfect focal point—the end…
What would you do if your school's ban on makeup meant you couldn't show off your nail art? You'd get your chemistry set out and invent a new UV-reactive polish that was near-invisible indoors, but was bright and colorful when you're outside lessons, wouldn't you? Well, you would if you were a group of students in…
Scientists at the Britannia Royal Navy College are working hard to make the idea of an invisible ship a reality using metamaterials that refract light in such a way that it "bends" around an object, making it appear as if it were invisible. This would only account for viewing with the naked eye however—naturally radar…
We wrote about this a long, long time ago, but the invisible bookshelf that magically props up your reading material is now available from ThinkGeek at $12.99—ten bucks cheaper than it was before. [ThinkGeek]
