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Cloaking devices -- it's not just 'Star Trek' anymore
During the 175th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, being held May 7-11, 2018, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, [Amanda D.] Hanford will describe the physics behind an underwater acoustic shield designed in her lab.
Hanford and her team set out to engineer a metamaterial that can allow the sound waves to bend around the object as if it were not there. Metamaterials commonly exhibit extraordinary properties not found in nature, like negative density. To work, the unit cell -- the smallest component of the metamaterial -- must be smaller than the acoustic wavelength in the study.
[...] To date, most acoustic metamaterials have been designed to deflect sound waves in air. Hanford decided to take this work one step further and accept the scientific challenge of trying the same feat underwater. Acoustic cloaking underwater is more complicated because water is denser and less compressible than air. These factors limit engineering options.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Friday May 11 2018, @12:52AM (1 child)
I'm also paranoid about governments suppressing technology, but I'm not under the impression that they can suppress all of the technology they want to all of the time. If this was funded by DARPA or a similar agency and still public knowledge, I would agree with your assessment. This is how I feel about the optical cloaking tech DARPA has admitted to. [theguardian.com] But when something comes from academia, it's possible that they're actually breaking ground. It's also possible that the government has had something like this for a while, but no perfect counter-measures for it, and didn't succeed in keeping academia from investigating the same avenues.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday May 11 2018, @05:34AM
Anything called "Applied Physics Laboratory" has some government funding or otherwise has government tentacles in it.
This one, [jhuapl.edu] for example, doesn't even try to hide it.