It’s long been a dream of humanity: inventing a material to wrap annoying people in that will shut them up but good. And now, science has realized this dream.
It actually works a lot like a filter. Duke University’s merry band of physicists drilled holes in plastic sheets, stacked them in a certain way, and then applied them to an object. The sheets both reflect and contain sound waves due to their resonance.
The overall effect makes the object impossible to find acoustically, and also erases any sound the object makes. In short, it can’t hear you, and you can’t hear it.
This has a lot of military applications, obviously, but I’m pretty sure this will hit the market sooner rather than later; we all know somebody who could use some soundproofing.
[ via the really fast hedgehogs at Geekologie ]