海角大神

It sounds like a spectacular failure: this new technology works less than half the time and only for half the parties involved.

But a paper published in 听today announces that scientists have found a way to unreliably send out communications hidden so well that even their intended recipients can鈥檛 detect that they鈥檝e been sent. It is a stunning development in a previously mostly theoretical effort to develop Star Trek-like ultra-secure communication systems.

鈥淭he once fanciful invisibility cloak has now assumed a prominent place in scientific research,鈥� , authored by researchers at Purdue University.

The possibility that communications could be folded into a 鈥榯ime cloak鈥� was . In that paper, lead author Martin W. McCall proposed a theoretical 鈥渟pace-time cloak鈥� that 鈥渃onceals events rather than objects,鈥� borrowing light manipulating technology from prototype invisibility clocks to hide the event of sending the message.

That differs from current encryption technology, which conceals the information from unwanted readers but not the actual event of sending the information. Ill-intentioned spies, though unable to read the message, can then tell that a deliberately encrypted message was sent out, a telltale sign that the parties have something to hide.听

Or as Joseph Lukens, lead author of the latest research paper, told Nature: 鈥淚t doesn't just prevent eavesdroppers from reading your data 鈥� they wouldn鈥檛 even know there was any data there to hack.鈥�

Previous efforts to put McCall's theory into practice have made some headway: In 2011, a team headed by Alexander Gaeta, an optical physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York that manipulated laser pulses to hide slow-moving data for extremely brief periods of time.

Now, Purdue scientists have built on that research, discovering a way to cloak data 46 percent of the time at the full speed of common fiber optic networks.

The new technology works by manipulating light behavior so that the waves of light , creating a temporal gap in a light beam that is subsequently closed up. Anything that occurs during that hole in time cannot be detected 鈥� unfortunately, not even by the intended recipients.

For now, this may be a reasonable method of communication for those of us prone to sending messages we later regret. With the 鈥榯ime cloak,鈥� non-receipt is currently guaranteed.