David Lynch, R.I.P. (1946-2025)

In honor of the late great David Lynch, here are some photographs of a Twin Peaks-themed gingerbread house (or, more accurately, a gingerbread Red Room) my daughter constructed on Christmas Eve, 2023...

 

 

POPULAR MECHANICS on China's New Invisibility Cloak

From Brandon J. Weichert's 12-6-24 POPULAR MECHANICS article entitled "China Invented a New Invisibility Cloak. What Does That Mean for the Future of Warfare?":

[T]he Chinese military has worked to take invisibility cloaks out of the lab and into the clouds. As of 2018, the Guangqi Advanced Institute of Technology was allegedly producing more than 100,000 square feet of electromagnetic materials every year. These were created for China’s fifth-generation warplane, the Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon,” according to defense analysts Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer.

The Zhejiang University research team designed their invisibility cloak for a fast-moving drone, so they had to ensure that it could conceal a large, moving object in any weather and any environment, be it air, water, or land.

The scientists had to overcome the significant obstacles faced by past invisibility cloak experiments. For one, the metamaterials used in previous designs struggled to bend electromagnetic waves consistently into a single spot to maintain invisibility. So, the researchers developed a new three-dimensional metamaterial to manipulate incoming waves and ensure that the cloak remains invisible in any context.

With the help of artificial intelligence, the cloak adjusts to changing conditions like a chameleon: on-board sensors gauge factors like the frequency and angular velocity of incoming radar waves, then AI processes this information and directs the drone to manipulate tiny structures on the metamaterial’s surface to guide the waves. Unlike other cloak concepts, the researchers say the intelligent system could theoretically work in real time without human intervention.

In indoor tests simulating land, sea, and air environments, the cloaked drone’s electric field strength was, on average, about 90 percent similar to that of its background. This indicated that it tended to blend in significantly better than a drone without an invisibility cloak, which was only up to 45 percent similar in electric field strength relative to the background environment.

Zhejiang University’s new cloak technology has not been applied to Chinese warplanes because it’s intended for use (at least initially) on China’s massive, growing fleet of drones. Cloaking a drone, or a swarm of drones, with real invisibility would be a decisive advantage for China in any possible conflict with the United States or its allies in the Indo-Pacific region.

That goal may still be far off—invisibility cloaks still run into several challenges. For instance, invisibility cloaks struggle to precisely guide incoming radar waves from a wide range of frequencies.

But researchers around the world are continuing to perfect these devices, with the goal of reliable invisibility cloaks that can shroud vehicles, equipment, and even people in combat settings. Even a decade ago, the Chinese government was funding more than 40 different research projects on invisibility cloaks.

These shrouded drones could completely rewrite the rules of modern warfare.

To read the entire article, click HERE.