An unpowered invisibility cloak…

 

Watch this. There’s no electricity involved, and also no smart government operatives. The US and Canadian military couldn’t see much potential. The inventors tried to keep it secret and give the military a heads-up but they’re only getting replies now that it is on youtube. Another case of incompetence rising to the top in Western bureaucracy. If the West survives it will be despite our governments…

UK Express: Invisibility breakthrough: It’s cheap and it’s thin, and it would foil heat-seeking cameras as well.

Yaron Steinbuch, New York Post: ‘Invisibility cloak’ straight out of Harry Potter is now a thing

HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. has announced four patent applications for “Quantum Stealth,” its own version of the fantasy cloak that could be used to make things appear to be invisible.

“It can hide a person, a vehicle, a ship, spacecraft and buildings,” the British Columbia-based company said in a statement. “There is no power source. It is paper-thin and inexpensive.” …

It works just by bending light. An optical illusion.

“It bends light like a glass of water does where a spoon or straw looks bent except I figured out how to do it without […]

Wow. The colorblind see color

It’s not often that a technology provides so much instant enjoyment, astonishment, shaking, even tears. Tim Blair found a movie of a colorblind man seeing color for the first time. And there are lots of videos out there.

See one artist reduced to tears. Watch this young boy react. (The next man seems very happy but says “your world is so much better than mine.”) Or this boy at 40 seconds.

Know someone colorblind? Great Christmas Present (costs $350 USD plus).

People with red-green color blindness have red and green receptors that both react to an overlapping band of wavelengths producing shades of “brown”. I gather these glasses filter out the overlapping light so that the red receptors only react to red light and the green only to green.

(OK, so the first guy does “go on a bit” so watch then skip forward…)

Technology Review explains Enchroma Glasses:

9.5 out of 10 based on 60 ratings […]

Half a million people in the air at any one time

Marvel at the science and engineering that keeps these planes flying, and remarkably safely:

Planes in the sky with half a million people in the air at any one time | Guardian & Flightstats

How many flights are in the air at once? NOAA estimates that 5,000 planes are in the sky over the United States. On any given day, more than 87,000 flights travel through US airspace… globally estimates seem to be that there are around 8,000 – 13,000 though I didn’t happen to find an authoritative source.

This youtube shows the dots in motion:

8.4 out of 10 based on 60 ratings