Technology
Bonus Episode: "The Cloak of Invisibility"
In this bonus episode of Fibre Nation, host Alison Corleski explores the fascinating world of cloaking technology and its potential future applications. Featuring an interview with Dr. Scott Pihone, a...
Bonus Episode: "The Cloak of Invisibility"
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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Hey listeners, this is a special bonus episode for you. I'm actually on vacation,
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but yesterday I heard a lecture that was so ground shaking. I had to bring it to you immediately.
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I am recording this on my iPhone and then editing on the road so I apologize for the sound quality.
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What does it take to disappear? Not foraging documents or faking your death, but literally
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becoming invisible to the human eye. Scientists have worked on this for decades,
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and so-called cloaking technology is common on things like fighter jets.
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But, and here's where things get wild. Recent advances at several different universities
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have created flexible surfaces that are capable of bending light around objects. Essentially,
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they trick your eyes into not seeing them. And it might sound a bit like Harry Potter
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Hocus Pocus, but it is quite possible, maybe in the next decade, maybe two, to have clothing
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that makes the wearer invisible. Even if there's no such thing as magic invisible sheep.
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I'm Alice in Corleski and you're listening to Fibre Nation, Tales of Textiles, Kraft and Culture.
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Okay, maybe you want to bring the car around front and I'll see when he comes out there.
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Oh, shit, he's coming out the side. Okay, let me go. Dr. Hone. Dr. Hone. Dr. Hone. Hi.
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Hi, I'm sorry to, uh, Acastia like this. My name is I'm Alice in Corleski. I have a podcast
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called Fibre Nation and I just saw your lecture, which was amazing. Would you be willing to answer
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a few questions for me? I'm just sure. Sure. Not a problem. Okay. Thank you so much.
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Should we just should we just go in your car here? Okay, that works. Okay, great. Thanks.
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Yep, that's me in a parking lot at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Dr. Scott Pihone is
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Professor Maritrisius at the Aerospace and Engineering program there and is an expert on something
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called Aerocromatology, which it's not my thing at all, but the friend I'm traveling with is with
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the Aerospace program there and we attended the lecture. It was kind of a dorky date.
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I'm Dr. Scott Pihone and I lecture in Aerocromatology. Really what this is is just about the manipulation
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of light waves. So by manipulating the behavior of light, we can actually manipulate what people see
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or really in this case, what you don't see. So some people might have heard of what we call
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cloaking technology, we use it for military, aircraft satellites, that sort of thing.
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Even though cloaking technology was first used in an episode of Star Trek, it is a real thing.
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I asked Dr. Honey to explain more. Yeah, so there's really a couple of ways that we can do this,
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really the most common. There are coatings that absorb radar infrared light. You can still see a
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plane, but it's invisible to tracking. So from the ground, if you're using infrared guided missiles,
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radar tracking, it's really invisible to those systems. But really what we're working on is how to
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make things physically disappear to the naked eye. So to become invisible, really fundamentally,
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what it has to do is it just has to bend light around itself, but in a way that cast no shadow
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or create any sort of reflection. And he went on for a while and things got super technical,
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but basically there are different ways to bend light around objects. Some of these use lenses,
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we have a video from a research group at the University of Rochester and they totally
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make someone's hand disappear against a background. You can check it out on our show notes,
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but at the moment this Rochester cloak, as it's called, it only works in a very small radius.
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So you can hide a moving hand, but not a plane that's covering hundreds of miles.
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But then there are these experiments that Dr. Honey himself is leading using so-called metamaterials.
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Now these are engineered molecules. They don't occur in nature and they bend light in a much
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wider field of vision than the lenses did. So theoretically, a plane with this metamaterial paint
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job, it would trick the eye into not seeing it. But there's another problem.
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These metamaterials require rare earth metals and as an aim implies, they're not easy to get.
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Most are available in China and of course China wants them for their own applications.
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Secondly, the metamaterials that were able to manufacture aren't flexible. Anything moving,
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a plane, a satellite, the surface has some flexibility, so no matter how small,
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if these hard coatings don't flex enough, you get this kind of visual stutter.
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In other words, a stealth satellite that winks in and out of sight, it just isn't that stealthy.
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Yeah, we really tried everything. We tried different alloys, different heat treatments,
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different substrates under the cloaking materials.
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So I listened to your lecture and this was the part that really made me stand up and take notice.
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You got this bolt out of the blue. Can you tell me about that and why it was so incredible?
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Yeah, yeah. So it started when this team from Stanford reached out and they were doing some really
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amazing work in molecular biology. Jacob Ogis, he's a project lead there and he sent me this email
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and then asked me if I had ever thought about marmits.
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And here is the fiber angle with a quick detour into genetic engineering.
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Now, if you follow medical developments at all, you might have heard of gene therapy or something
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called CRISPR. That stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and I have
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no idea what that means, but I can tell you that it's a gene editing technology.
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So until recently, geneticists might attempt to combine DNA from completely different species,
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like I don't know, crossing a zebra with a potato. And it almost always failed, which is why we
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don't have stripy potatoes. But beginning in 2012, this CRISPR technology let us take just part of
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a gene and insert it into another gene from a completely different organism like a genetic cut and
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paste. So if we could isolate that stripy DNA from the zebra and insert it into the part of a
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potato gene that determines the peel, we could conceivably get that stripy potato eventually.
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And yet that is an absolutely goofy example. But CRISPR is behind amazing new developments in
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treating cancer and other diseases. Now, when you talk about DNA, you talk about living organisms,
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people or trees or bacteria. Things get truly mind-blowing when CRISPR led to cruncher.
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And that stands for carbon reorganized unique chromosomes. These allow scientists to insert
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non-genetic material into someone's DNA, which is like something out of a movie. And I am so oversimplifying
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this, but the team at Stanford had been attempting to insert inorganic matter into Marmot DNA.
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And initially, this was silicone to create marmot that were 100% waterproof.
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After Dr. Ogas's email, the Stanford and UC team started to work together and revised the
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experiment. Because if they could inject these light-bending meta-materials into organic DNA like
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from a Marmot, it was theoretically possible to get critters that grow fur that make them invisible
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to the human eye. And fur is flexible. Marmot shed a lot, and they make other marmot very quickly.
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And yes, we're talking fur not wool, but invisible sheep they are nowhere on the horizon.
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Yeah, so really most of these experiments were just complete failures. We're talking organic,
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inorganic materials. It was really sci-fi stuff that had never been done before. Finally, in 2019,
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things started to work. Now we have a small group of these marmots with us fur.
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They can't reproduce at this time. We're not really quite there yet, but so far we've really pushed
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the boundaries beyond what anyone thought was possible. But does it work? Kind of. The marmots themselves
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weren't completely invisible. At this point, really, it's only the fur that has these light-bending
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properties. So if you have a marmot with a bald spot, that's going to be an issue. You can still see
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their feet. And a lab is such a controlled environment. We really have no idea how this is going to
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react in sunlight, or if we're talking about cloaking satellites, how it's going to behave in space.
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So they had to start testing. And trigger warning here, the marmots they didn't fare well.
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Some were strapped to fighter planes on training exercises, others were strapped to tanks, and this
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was to see if they were effective as a military cloaking device. Then you had a pair of marmots
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named Fred and Barney. They actually went to the International Space Station to test satellite
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cloaking there. And here's the thing that the scientists didn't count on, and it's kind of
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unfortunate. Gamma rays in space are a penetrating form of radiation, and they have extremely high
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energy levels. They also have the shortest wavelength of any light ray. It's so short that the
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marmot fur couldn't actually bend them. So with no spacesuits to protect them, both Fred and
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Barney absorbed an enormous amount of these gamma rays, and went up in balls of flame just hours
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into their space flight, true martyrs to science. Dr. Honey had only a few minutes to give me for
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the interview, so our story needs to stop here. But just think about this. In a generation maybe
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two, we might have developed genetic technology that makes invisible cloth a cloak of invisibility,
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if you will, a reality, even if it's just in a lab. I guess we'll have to say that non-seeing
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is believing. Thank you for listening to Fiber Nation. If you like what you hear, please
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rate us and leave a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your ratings help
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other people find us. This episode of Fiber Nation is produced by me, Alison Corleski. Scott Meyer
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was our astro-scientist, and no marmots were harmed because we totally made that part up.
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But invisible technology is a thing, as is gene editing, so please check out our show notes for
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more information about these things. Happy April Fools!