Last week scientists discovered how to make things invisible, or at least how to make them appear as such for the human eye. So far the invisibility cloak is only minute, measuring 100 microns by 30 microns - but it is fully functioning. Recreating it on a larger scale could be technically very challenging, but I guess we can assume that it will work at one point in the future - which will give great new opportunities for designers (and also great tools for hiding the ugly stuff).

European researchers have taken the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter's invisibility cloak after they made an object disappear, a study published Thursday in the journal Science showed.

Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London used their cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in Science. "It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet -- except this time the carpet also disappears," they said.

Via Discovery