From the Klingon cloaking device on their Birds of Prey ships to Harry Potter's cloak, science and fantasy fiction is awash with invisibility devices. And now, the community of defence and technology online is in a veritable frenzy today with the news that scientists have created a material that can bend light in three different dimensions, rendering objects invisible.

The team at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a material that deflects light around an object as perceived by the human eye.

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By George Friedman

There are many people who write history. There are very few who make history through their writings. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week at the age of 89, was one of them. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn laid the intellectual foundations for the fall of Soviet communism. That is well known. But Solzhenitsyn also laid the intellectual foundation for the Russia that is now emerging. That is less well known, and in some ways more important.

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