I used to be a Science and Technology Editor/Reporter, and I really enjoyed doing it. So I will do it here, weekly, providing what I think are interesting science links, related to either sci-fiey(its a real word, trust me, like on Top Gear!) topics, or neat technology news. If people like the posts, I will continue them!

So first on the round-up is anti-science. The basic objection to this quantum mechanics invalidating materialism view is that it fails the testable benchmark.

Any scientific theory, to be usable and practical, must have several elements.

• It must have grounding in the science that has gone before.
• It must make testable predictions.
• It must be observable.

These are the basics, and pretty much every instance of woo or quack science fails at least one of these, if not all of them. If you're trying to figure out if something is nuts, ask if it breaks any of these rules.

You also have the wonder of correctness by authority; Werner Heisenberg argued that materialism would go away, so therefore it must be correct! A scientist can be a great scientist and still mess up on the philosophy of science. This is where critical thinking comes into play; where you check to see if what they're saying makes sense.

Now in much cooler news, we have the first successful test of cloaking a 3d object from all angles!

This works by using metamaterials to manipulate light and electromagnetic waves. Most normal materials have a positive refractive index, the degree to which they bend light away from the focal point. Metamaterials can have a negative refractive index, which can do some really neat stuff like bend light around an object, without the light being distorted.

Such metamaterials have been developed, including right here in my hometown at UBC-Okanagan, but their effectiveness is not as great as researchers had hoped. The negative refractive indices were not as high as needed to create an invisibility cloak, until this major step was achieved.

We could eventually have Predator/Harry Potter-like invisibility one day! (I never thought I'd come to a day where I put Predator and Harry Potter in the same sentence...)