Who among us hasn’t harbored the fantasy of being invisible? It offers so many juicy possibilities, both licit and illicit.

But—there’s always a but—no respectable scientist would tell you anything other than it’s impossible. Unless you’re Harry Potter, of course.

Until recently, that is. In 2006 researchers from Duke University announced the creation of metamaterials that can bend light around an object and reconstitute it on the other side. Voila, the object becomes invisible (Science 312 [23 June 2006], 1780–1782).

Trouble is, it works only in a narrow slice of the microwave region of the spectrum where human beings can cook but have no visual acuity. No use being invisible where you can’t see.

Science always moves along, though, and now the Duke research group, joined by collaborators at Southeast University, Nanjing, China, have expanded the spectrum of invisibility in a new publication (Science 323 [16 January 2009], 366–369). The metamaterial cloak is a complex structure with thousands of individual glass-fiber subunits arranged on a copper-clad circuit board. The exact arrangement is determined through an intricate mathematical algorithm. The device covers a broader wavelength distribution than the original and also redirects a higher fraction of the incident light (i.e., the object underneath is more invisible).

Alas, the coverage is still confined to the microwave region of the spectrum, but according to the authors, it “should scale well toward optical wavelengths.”

Better put your cape on eBay, Harry Potter!

Have you succumbed to the lure of Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader?

Each device is about the size of a trade paperback and can store hundreds of e-books and e-magazines. The electronic paper displays are pretty realistic. You can do everything you’d expect to do with real paper, like highlighting, notes, and bookmarks. You can even do a text search, which of course can’t be done with the old fashioned book.

But you can’t read in color, which limits graphics and other aesthetic pleasures of reading.

Clever chemistry, though, may be showing the way to a more colorful future. A collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of Toronto, published in Angewandte Chemie (48:5 [January 2009], 943–947), reveals the synthesis of photonic crystals that can emit a broad spectrum of colors.

Photonic crystals are periodic nanostructures with alternately repeating regions of high and low dielectric constant. The starting point is polyferrocenylsilane (PFS) derivatives, and the resulting material has the capacity to be bright, flexible, battery friendly, and rapidly tuned to almost any visible color.

Progress toward electronic publication is both impressive and inevitable. I’ll miss the old style, though. What else am I going to put on my endless shelves if all the beloved books fit into a puny handheld device?

Along with the recent traversal of 2008 into 2009, we gained a second of time.

Because time based on the rotation of the earth and the time standard based on atomic clocks are not precisely the same, every so often one second is added at the end of the year. Although there is dissent about the use of a “leap second,” this practice helps keep everything in sync.

Prior to last year, 2005 received the most recent “gift of time.” The next gift will be determined by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). What an awesome responsibility.

What could happen in one second of time?

• Light travels 299,792,458 meters.
• A fast enzyme can process 600,000 substrates (carbonic anhydrase appears to hold the speed record).
• A slow enzyme catalyzes only 0.5 reactions (lysozyme is one such sluggard).
• A car going 60 mph travels 88 feet.
• 10¹⁷ molecules of glucose can pass across a cell membrane.
• The isotope helium-6 goes through one half life.
• A typical personal computer has a couple billion clock ticks.
• A hummingbird beats its wings 50 times.

As for me, I had one extra heartbeat in 2008 and lingered extra long on the new-year’s-eve kiss to my wife. I look forward to the next such occasion.

Having reliably made over 100 Periodic Tabloid posts, I’ve decided to become more irregular.

I’ll still pop something up when I see a cool scientific discovery, some bit of news, an interesting person, or an original idea. But the press of other duties will mean these ramblings won’t occur as often, or on predictable days.

I will continue to relish hearing from readers, though, especially when you want to take exception, suggest alternate hypotheses, or point me to an oddity of intellectual life that’s worth checking into. Such are the pleasures of life and blogging.