A new invisibility cloak for sound could help doctors find tiny tumors or hide submarines from enemy sonar.

“Our focus is not about dampening noise, but to guide sound waves around structures,” said Nicholas Fang, a professor a the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and coauthor, along with Shu Zhang and Leilei Yin, on a paper that appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.

For example, “if we have a coating on a submarine that bends acoustics waves before they hit the surface, guiding them around the submarine smoothly, then you won’t be able to detect a submarine using sonar.”

The same technology that could render a military submarine invisible to sonar could also be used to create high-definition, in-utero baby pictures or detect previously undetectable, tiny tumors.

via ‘Cloak of silence’ tech could hide submarines – Discovery.com- msnbc.com.