9 Movie Mad Scientists That Might Have Been Onto Something

In H. G. Wells' novel, The Invisible Man, a scientist named Griffin devotes himself to the pursuit of invisibility, eventually managing to render himself completely invisible. Unfortunately, he hasn't quite figured out how to reverse the procedure and gets stuck like that.

Real-life scientists (and Harry Potter fanatics) are similarly fascinated by the prospect of being able to make things disappear at will, and lots of research is being piled into invisibility projects. These range from the purely scientific to military (you can see why that would be handy in battle).

We're not quite at the point of inventing a full-on infallible invisibility cloak, but researchers at the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have recently developed a material that, when made into a box, can hide some pretty big objects.

So far, experiments in invisibility have been able to make tiny objects, no bigger than the wavelength of visible light, disappear, but this material can cloak macroscopic objects as big as a smartphone or (weirdly) a wheel of cheese (presumably they just happened to have one lying around in the lab).

The technology basically works by scattering light and you are even able to hold the invisible box in your hands. Perfect for stashing your secret stuff in, even if we haven't quite developed a full cloak yet.