As amazing as this may sound, remember we’re talking about an incredible technological breakthrough, not Harry Potter or The Lord of The Rings. This story started two years ago when a group of scientists from KIT in Germany managed to create pentamodes, also knows as mechanical metamaterials. The project kept developing until the same group discovered recently an amazing property in the materials, to be more exact, their ability to hide/cloak other materials hidden within them. Apart from hiding whatever lays within them, the researchers are certain this discovery could lead to manufacturing almost everything from camping gear to shoes that give you the impression of walking on thin air.
The amazing metamaterial is a polymer-based structure that’s build at a millimeter scale and has the property of reshaping itself around an object. What’s even more extraordinary is the fact it disperses pressure in a way that human touch can’t even detect the object’s existence. If mechanical metamaterial existed at the time the princess from “The Princess and the pea”, she would have never felt the pea, even if she slept on only one metamaterial mattress. Returning to the real life, here’s what the team describes it’s metamaterial as:
“It is a crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy. It consists of needle-shaped cones, whose tips meet. The size of the contact points is calculated precisely to reach the mechanical properties desired. In this way, a structure results, through which a finger or a measurement instrument cannot feel its way.”
The mechanical metamaterial is also very “good-looking” and very light due to its nano design, and the fact that its structure is produced by Nanoscribe’s 3D laser lithography says a few thing about how far technology reached. All in all, the project is still in development, even if it started as a simple research project that promised nothing. Now, the researchers see a great future for their nanomaterial.
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Let’s imagine a future where you won’t have to see any cables around you house because they’re cloaked under the material, or imagine how well you could sleep when you go camping and won’t feel any pebbles or small twigs pushing against your back. Of course many of us will go further with imagining things and see ourselves walking around in invisibility cloaks that also make us untouchable. Things don’t go that far, invisibility in this case applies only to small objects you won’t be able to feel from underneath the metamaterial, so wrapping yourself in it will only help others take for a couch. Anyways, we’ll have to wait until metamaterials will have an actual purpose and move from the stage of “project” to mass production.