TL;DR
Infrared cameras find things by the heat around them, which is why they can spot a hidden object in the dark or through smoke. Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Technical University of Denmark say they have built the first cloak that steers heat around a hidden object in all three dimensions, so an infrared camera sees the same heat pattern it would see if nothing were there. That is a real, working piece of the science-fiction invisibility cloak, on the heat side rather than the visible-light side. In time it could mean electronics that manage their own heat far more precisely and, possibly, objects that heat-seeking cameras cannot pick out. For now it works only in a lab, and only on objects that make no heat of their own.
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