Here's a 3D-printed 'cloaking device' you could make at home

Kevin Lee

Kevin LeeContributor, TechHive

Kevin is a small-time tech hound, amateur photographer, and a general know-at-least-something of all things geeky hailing from New York.
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Duke University
Yaroslav Urzhumov holds the 3D-printed invisibility cloak.

We’ve seen our fair share of invisibility cloaks in the past, but for the most part they’ve only been the stuff of research labs or fantasy novels. Now engineers from Duke University have used a non-industrial grade 3D printer to create an invisibility cloak that you could fabricate at home.

Unlike previous attempts at creating invisibility cloaks, Duke University researchers decided to skimp on the expensive metamaterials and opted to create a completely polymer-based invisibility cloak using the stereolithographic fabrication process of a 3D printer. The resulting cloak—which can render you invisible to microwave scanning (though not visible light)—looks more like a Frisbee made of swiss cheese, but the researchers assure us that it really works.

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Flyknit uses a Kinect to turn your movement into colorful swirls

Corey Tamas

Corey TamasContributor, TechHive

Corey Tamas is a communications consultant, a father, and professional musician in Ottawa, Ontario.
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Universal Everything

When you think of Nike, you may only imagine exhausted runners throwing up on their shoes, but UK digital art studio Universal Everything has something just a bit more elegant in mind. Commissioned by Nike, they’ve created a breathtaking art installation called Flyknit that dynamically uses the human body to generate beautiful images.

Flyknit uses Kinect cameras to capture the motion of nearby observers and then digitally translates the image into swirling, undulating swarms of colors and shapes. Imagine standing near a giant cube that senses your motion and interprets it back to you by displaying colorful, swirling video on each of its four sides, following your motions in a colorful cascade.

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Science Wrap: Google and NASA are building a quantum-computer-powered AI

Kevin Lee

Kevin LeeContributor, TechHive

Kevin is a small-time tech hound, amateur photographer, and a general know-at-least-something of all things geeky hailing from New York.
More by Kevin Lee

D-Wave Systems

Happy weekend, folks! In case you’re not the thousands people gawking at all the amazing maker creations at the Bay Area Maker Faire, we’ve got lots of cool and freaky science going for your reading enjoyment. We’ll look at an AI learning machine put together by NASA and Google, an extremely expensive piece of 3D printed meat, and much more.

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This Week in Lego: Appliances for the kitchen and mechanical menaces

Cassandra Khaw

Cassandra KhawContributor, TechHive

Cassandra Khaw is an entry-level audiophile, a street dancer, a person who writes about video games for a living, and someone who spends too much time on Twitter.
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LEGO DOU Moko/Flickr

Lego creations are great, but they're even better when they're larger than logical or capable of helping you make a banana cream pie. This Friday, we have kitchen appliances, a 4-foot-tall tribute to Evangelion, and more. Now, if only someone will make a fully functional tricorder out of Lego blocks.

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Arduino's first robotics kit is coming, and it rolls around like a Roomba

Kevin Lee

Kevin LeeContributor, TechHive

Kevin is a small-time tech hound, amateur photographer, and a general know-at-least-something of all things geeky hailing from New York.
More by Kevin Lee

Arduino

Arduino has already made it easier to build your own electronics projects. Now, the microcontroller board maker is about to enter the robotics market with what it calls the first official Arduino on wheels.

The company has teamed up with Complubot, the four-time world champions in the Robocup Junior robot soccer tournament, to create a new Arduino robotics kit.The robot’s hardware is completely open source—just like a regular Arduino board—so you can change the software controlling the robot or stack your own hardware on top of it.

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