Forget Harry Potter, wizards and witches – this one’s for real. Scientists claim to have developed materials that can now perfectly reflect the background, in effect acting as an invisibility cloak.

Since time immemorial, the elusive power of invisibility has been linked to the even-more-elusive status of invincibility.

While invincibility has remained constrained to the realm of fairytales and, of course, popular video games, the idea of invisibility, however surrealistic it might sound, actually became a practical matter for the scientific community in 2006, with the suggestion that artificially structured metamaterials could enable a new electromagnetic design paradigm, now termed transformation optics.