We won't even front: Duke's quasi-invisibility cloak is far cooler than this, but a team of microscopic robots sure have the potential to do more good than a glorified figment of someone's imagination. Bruce Donald, a Duke professor of computer science and biochemistry, has teamed up with a few other mad scientists in order to create ridiculously tiny robots that can dance on objects smaller than a pin's head. According to Mr. Donald, they are "almost 100 times smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less." Sure, watching these critters do the tango is undoubtedly entertaining, but he's hoping to collaborate with the medical center in order to "probe the molecular and cellular architectures of very small things such as cells." We appreciate the dedication to mankind and all, but don't pretend like you don't goof off with these guys on your coffee breaks, Bruce.

[Via Slashdot]

We know, most of you Blue Devil fans are still reeling from that recent loss to Wake Forest, but if it's any consolation, at least your campus is about to become home to the "world's largest" 802.11n wireless network. Last we heard, The Ohio State University held the crown for Earth's biggest WLAN with 1,700 access points lit, but according to Cisco, Duke's campus will soon house 2,500 Aironet 1250 Series APs. The installation will leave more than six million square feet of central North Carolina blanketed in WiFi, and will supposedly be the "largest planned 802.11n wireless network in the world by any organization to date." Watch out, Dukies -- we hear those folks in Chapel Hill have a thing for swiping unsecured signals.

Apparently not content with simply building an invisibility cloak, of sorts, those mad scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering now say that they've found that a three-dimensional "sound cloak" is also possible, in theory. According to Duke's Steven Cummer, the researchers have come up with a "recipe" for an acoustic material that would "essentially open up a hole in space and make something inside that hole disappear from sound waves." Needless to say, they haven't tested that possibility just yet, but they say it could one day be used to hide submarines from detection by sonar or even be used to improve the acoustics of a concert hall by making inconvenient structural beams effectively disappear. What's more, they say that the basic principles at play here could also suggest that cloaks could be created for other wave systems, like seismic waves, or even waves at the surface of the ocean, although the practical applications for those would seem to be a bit more limited.

[Image courtesy of Royal Navy/BAE Systems]

It's been a while since we've heard from the folks at Duke University and their robot-controlling monkeys, but it seems that they've remained hard at work on their potentially perilous collaboration, with them recently showing off some of their latest tricks at the Neuroscience 2007 conference earlier this month. This time, they had the monkeys control a pair of robot legs through the use of some electrodes implanted in their brains which, apparently, went off without a hitch. But that's not all! The legs the monkeys were controlling just so happened to be located at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, which the monkeys were linked to via the Internet. No word on what they plan to attempt next, although taking the robots and/or monkeys into space would seem to be the next logical step (at least to us).

[Photo courtesy of NASA-JSC / Wikimedia Commons]

Yes, everyone wants an invisibility cloak. Yes, it's been theorized and in development before. But now, what our friends across the pond have only imagined, scientists at an American university have actually built. A group of brainiacs at Duke University have built a device (based on the Imperial College London theory) that can deflect microwave beams so the beams flow around an object almost as if nothing was there, with not too much distortion (but only in two dimensions). In order to do this, the group built a series of concentric circles made up of "metamaterials," or "artificial composites that can be made to interact with electromagnetic waves in ways that natural materials cannot reproduce." Don't get too excited yet, as scientists warn that this is merely a "baby step." The next step is to make the cloak work in three dimensions, and make improve the cloak's effectiveness. And even still, we're a long way off from making something completely disappear from visibility, which "would have to simultaneously interact with all of the wavelengths, or colors, that make up light." said David R. Smith, a member of the research squad. Hey Duke team, if you ever need human test subjects, we'd definitely be willing to volunteer.

[Via The Associated Press]