Harry Potter's invisibility cloak has broken through the realm of fiction and into reality. Michael Bockstaller and Krzystof Matyjaszewski of Carnegie Mellon University has successfully created their own version of the said cloak for nanoparticles.

In their demonstration, the researchers showed how controlling the structure of nanoparticles can "shrink" their visible size by a factor of thousands, all the while maintaining the particle's actual physical dimension.

Says Bockstaller,

What we are doing is creating a novel technique to control the architecture of nanoparticles that will remedy many of the problems associated with the application of nanomaterials that are so essential to business sectors such as the aerospace and cosmetics industry.