Saturday, March 20, 2010
Obama hails 'historic' healthcare reform vote
Obama hails 'historic' healthcare reform vote
Obama hails 'historic' health bid
US President Barack Obama has described a congressional vote on healthcare reform due on Sunday as a "historic" moment in a century-long struggle.
Speaking at a rally in Virginia, he dismissed criticism of the bill from Republicans and some Democrats.
Appealing to lawmakers and citizens to back the legislation, he said: "The time for reform is right now."
Democrats are still working to secure enough House of Representatives votes to pass a Senate version of the bill.
The BBC's Mark Mardell in Virginia says that Mr Obama's speech was fiery but the Democratic Party seems deflated, with no real desire to motivate the people.
'Hard debate'
The reforms would deliver on Mr Obama's top domestic priority by providing insurance to some 30 million Americans who currently lack it.
 |  Not only can we afford to do this. We can't afford not to do this  US President Barack Obama  |
Calling the battle to create the bill, "messy", "frustrating" and "ugly", Mr Obama said the final proposal was the culmination of a year of "hard debate".
"Every argument has been made," he told students at George Mason University.
"We have incorporated the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans into a final proposal."
The House of Representatives and the Senate adopted different versions of the bill in November and December.
The usual procedure would be for two versions of legislation to be combined into a single bill for President Obama to sign into law. But after Senate Democrats lost the 60-seat majority required to defeat a filibuster by Republicans, Democratic leaders decided to use a controversial procedure to ensure the bill's passage.
Under the plan, the House will vote on a package of reconciliation "fixes" amending the Senate bill.
'Bill of rights'
The Senate will then be able to make changes in a separate bill using a procedure known as reconciliation, which allows budget provisions to be approved with 51 votes - rather than the 60 needed to overcome blocking tactics.
| MARDELL'S AMERICA  I can't help thinking the Democrats haven't been trying or even thinking that hard about how to win this argument. The president seems sometimes like a one-man band Mark Mardell BBC North America editor |
Mr Obama brushed aside Republican claims that the bill was too costly and said Americans had been told "a whole bunch of nonsense" about its contents.
The reform, he said, "brings our deficit down by more than one trillion dollars over the next two decades. Not only can we afford to do this. We can't afford not to do this."
According to Congressional Budget Office, the final version of the Democrats' healthcare plan will cut the federal deficit by $138bn over 10 years.
The non-partisan body said the proposed legislation would cost about $940bn over a decade.
| ANALYSIS  Paul Adams, BBC News, Washington President Obama's speech to college students in suburban Washington was passionate, loud and frequently unscripted. But the outcome of this long, bitter debate is still not certain. With Republicans united in opposition, at least 28 Democrats in the House of Representatives say they will also oppose the bill. Just another 10 opponents out of about 30 who are currently undeclared, and the bill will not pass. The Republicans - who seem to sense that they may lose Sunday's historic vote - are already promising to punish vulnerable Democrats in November's mid-term elections. |
The president also lashed out an insurance companies whose lobbyists, he said, were prowling the corridors of Washington, trying to prevent the bill passing.
"We are going to end the worst practices of insurance companies. This is a patients' bill of rights on steroids," he told a cheering crowd.
The reforms would increase insurance coverage through tax credits for the middle class and expansion of the Medicaid programme for the poor.
If approved, they would represent the biggest change in the US healthcare system since the creation in the 1960s of Medicare, the government-run scheme for Americans aged 65 or over.
US HEALTHCARE AND WORLD COMPARISONS
- Healthcare reform is a priority for Barack Obama. The US spends about $2.2tn a year on its system - which includes private, federal or employer schemes.
US HEALTHCARE AND WORLD COMPARISONS
- US expenditure on healthcare is the equivalent of about 16.2% of GDP - nearly twice that of some other OECD countries.
US HEALTHCARE AND WORLD COMPARISONS
- The US falls behind some OECD countries for life expectancy and has a higher rate of infant mortality. Almost 46m US citizens do not have health insurance.
Youtube accuse Viacom of 'secret uploads'
Youtube accuse Viacom of 'secret uploads'
 More than 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute |
YouTube has accused media conglomerate Viacom of secretly uploading content to the video-sharing site whilst publicly complaining about its presence.
YouTube said it deliberately "roughed up" any uploaded videos to make them look stolen or leaked.
The accusation was made as a court prepares to rule in a $1bn suit brought by Viacom against Youtube for "massive intentional copyright infringement".
Viacom said it had identified 150,000 such infringements on the site.
"YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube's founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement," Viacom said in a statement.
"By their own admission, the site contained 'truckloads' of infringing content."
But Zahavah Levine, YouTube's chief counsel, accused Viacom of covert operations to add copyright infringing content.
"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there," she wrote in a blog post.
| Looking at the quotes, claims and counter-claims, it really reads like the stuff of soaps. Maggie Shiels Technology reporter |
"It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately 'roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked.
"It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom."
'Evil'
Viacom's 2007 lawsuit centres around a claim that YouTube consistently allowed unauthorised copies of popular TV shows and movies to be posted to its website and viewed tens of thousands of times.
The company said it had identified more thousands of abuses including clips from shows such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged.
YouTube has always argued that it is covered by law through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which states that publishers are not responsible for material posted by users.
 YouTube boasts the biggest video sharing audience in the world |
Companies are required by law to remove unauthorised clips from sites when they have been notified by the owner.
YouTube has insisted it has followed that rule and a month before the lawsuit, it took down more than 100,000 clips at Viacom's request.
But Viacom claims that YouTube founders flouted copyright and deliberately encouraged it in favour of increasing traffic to the site.
Documents revealed in court quoted a message sent on 19 June 2005 from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen to fellow co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.
"Jawed (Karim), please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it," said the e-mail.
Another e-mail from Mr Chen to staff in the early days of the start-up's life said the company "should concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil".
The documents also reveal that Viacom considered buying YouTube just months before it launched the suit. Executives from Viacom thought it would be a "transformative acquisition".
They were eventually beaten by Google, which bought the site for $1.65bn.
'Prize fight'
Journalists and bloggers covering the story have said the whole affair smacks of a something you would see on TV.
"This looks like a reality show but the audience doesn't get a vote," Peter Kafka, senior editor of the news and technology blog AllThingsD.com told BBC News.
"The only person both sides have to win over is the judge. This is court filing of a three year-old case and the industry has moved on and realised this stuff is hard to monetise."
Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Institute of Santa Clara University, told the San Jose Mercury News, that there will be no real winners in this legal battle.
"It's like a prize fight - they are both scoring points; they are both beating each other up. But instead of making money from the fight, they are paying to be in it. That's really dumb"
US District Judge Louis Stanton has given both parties until 30 April to file opposing arguments to each other's motions. All the arguments are expected to be completed by June.
The bitter battle over bluefin tuna
The bitter battle over bluefin tuna
| By Paul Henley BBC News, Barcelona |
"Welcome to the strange world of globalisation."
That is Roberto Mielgo's response to the fact that it is commercially viable to catch and keep live tuna in off-shore pens - or ranches - in the Spanish Mediterranean and feed them vast amounts of expensive caught fish (around 10kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1kg of body weight).
And to cull them by hand using divers, ship them to shore, package them in a purpose-built factory and fly them whole - on the same day - to market on the other side of the world.
Roberto Mielgo calls himself an independent fisheries consultant.
A former tuna rancher himself, he had a change of heart and became one of the most prominent campaigners for the preservation of bluefin tuna, one of the most highly-prized - and fought over - species and foodstuffs in the world.
Fishing lobby
The fact that the United Nations commission set up to preserve endangered species failed, at its conference in Doha this week, to put an international trade ban on this type of tuna, is a bitter disappointment to him.
But, he says, it is not necessarily a surprise, given the strength of the global fishing lobby.
"The Japanese market eats 80% of all the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna that is produced," Mr Mielgo says.
|  If you ask me whether to save the stock or to save some jobs, my answer is pretty clear - save the stock Roberto Mielgo, Fisheries consultant |
"They are willing to pay the highest price. It is just normal that tuna ranches here in Europe export their very best to the other side of the world.
"There are people who are trying to manage a sound business with an environmental perspective that do abide by the rules and I have great respect for them.
"Others do not abide by the rules. It is not a question of criminalising the entire sector, but one has to see the overall problem and that is that tuna ranching is a big part of the problem. It has grown out of proportion," he said.
"If you ask me whether to save the stock or to save some jobs, my answer is pretty clear - save the stock. The stock belongs to all of us. It's not because two or three companies will have to close that I should not protect a species.
"We have been playing with fire for the past eight years, we have been overfishing the species to the brink of collapse. It has been a crazy gold-rush."
'Dangerous plundering'
Juan Serrano disagrees.
As managing director of Balfego, a company that runs Spain's biggest tuna ranch at L'Ametlla de Mar, on the Catalan coast, he has seen profit margins dive.
 Most tuna caught in the Mediterranean ends up on Japanese plates |
And he is, he says, one of the "goodies" of the tuna industry.
He vehemently disputes the idea that the bluefin tuna is, in his waters at least, a threatened species.
"What we are doing is not only entirely legal," Mr Serrano says.
"It is sustainable. There is ample scientific evidence from independent sources which confirms our belief that bluefin tuna populations in the western Mediterranean are actually increasing."
Environmentalists say the average size of the individual tuna caught for Balfego's ranch is going down steadily year on year - a sign, allegedly, of a dangerous plundering of the stock.
This, again, is disputed by Mr Serrano. It is not as if the extraction of tuna from the Spanish Mediterranean is a free-for-all.
The entire national quota of tuna is caught by six boats in the single month per year they are allowed to operate.
Laid on ice
They deliver their whole catch to ranches along the Spanish coast.
The impressive size of the fish Balfego chooses to show me being harvested on the particular day I visited can not be questioned.
Specimens of 150kg - longer than a man in length - are culled by divers with a spear-gun, hoisted on board, headed and gutted within minutes and laid in ice to preserve the valuable flesh at its best.
 Tuna fillets are graded according to quality |
On shore, the fish are inspected and quality-controlled in order to fetch the maximum price on a market which is supplied on demand and year-round in a way which would not be possible without the live storage facility of a ranch.
"Within this industry," says Mr Serrano, "there are good and bad operators."
"No doubt there are some that operate on the wrong side of the rules.
"What the EU needs to do is punish the bad ones, take away their licenses. But we should not all be tarred with the same brush. Sustainability is vital to us, as is transparency in what we do."
There is, of course, an irony that, while fishing authorities in Brussels openly declare their support for a moratorium on bluefin fishing in the Mediterranean, their rules continue to allow tuna to be caught by boats which were constructed with the help of public subsidies and processed in factories built, similarly, with EU financial aid.
There are, undoubtedly, many in Brussels who will breathe a sigh of relief at the decision of the Doha conference.
For now, it seems, the fishing lobby has won the day.
'Great worry'
Local authorities with the interests of the fishermen at heart are not, however, celebrating yet.
Marti Sans, in charge of the Catalan government's department of fishing in Barcelona, says the outlook for the tuna-catchers is fairly bleak.
He stresses that no public money currently subsidises their operations.
And he acknowledges that the days of net-catching tuna in the region could be numbered.
"This is our great worry," he says. "Because we know at the moment that the pressure is very strong.
"Environmental organisations have made this issue a big priority. At the moment, we are defending a type of fishing that has been been carried out well and rationally. But we have to accept that decisions are taken at higher levels which may force us into a very different situation and ultimately threaten what we do."
British Airways cabin crew begin strike action
British Airways cabin crew begin strike action
 BA says that 65% of passengers will be able to fly this weekend |
British Airways cabin crew have begun strike action that will cause severe disruption to flights for the next three days.
Talks between the airline and the Unite union, which represents the crew, collapsed on Friday.
A further four days of action are set to begin on 27 March, although BA has said this weekend's action could disrupt flights into next week as well.
Cabin crew are striking over pay and working conditions.
BA says that 65% of passengers will still be able to reach their destination during the first three-day strike, even though a total of 1,100 BA flights out of the 1,950 scheduled to operate will be cancelled.
At Gatwick, all long-haul flights and more than half of short-haul flights are expected to operate as normal.
At Heathrow, more than 60% of long-haul flights will operate, though only 30% of short-haul flights are expected to do so, with the help of aircraft leased from rival airlines.
Uncertainty still exists about just how many BA crew will go on strike after BA said that any staff who took part in strike action would lose perks, including heavily-discounted travel fares.
BA says that it is confident that it can handle 49,000 passengers on each of Saturday and Sunday, compared with around 75,000 on a normal weekend day in March.
Revised offer
In a video message on the BA website, chief executive Willie Walsh apologised to passengers for what he said was a "terrible day" for the airline.
However, he said he was confident that a "good service" would be provided.
Mr Walsh and Unite union joint general secretary Tony Woodley failed to reach an agreement to avert action on Friday in the increasingly bitter dispute.
| BA is now run by accountants BA cabin crew member |
After the talks failed, Mr Woodley said Mr Walsh wanted to "go to war" with the union. Mr Walsh dismissed the claim as "absolute nonsense".
Mr Woodley had called on BA to put an earlier deal to end the strikes "back on the table", which he said would have allowed him to call off the strike while union members considered it.
Instead, Mr Walsh offered a less attractive deal to compensate the company for the costs already incurred in making alternative arrangements for some passengers to fly during the strikes.
Mr Woodley called the revised offer a "disgrace and an insult", and refused to present it to union members.
Cost cutting
Unite official Brian Boyd told BBC News that the union wanted to negotiate an end to the dispute.
He said: "We've had two strike ballots, we've been trying to negotiate with the company for the last year, and we've still reached a position where British Airways want to impose changes to our members' terms and conditions of employment. We're not going to allow that to happen.
"If Willie Walsh and BA management want to negotiate a settlement, then this union is up for that."
Among the passengers inconvenienced is James Alexander, from Newcastle, who is due to emigrate to Australia with his partner on Monday, the last day of the strike.
He said: "I've told them today on the phone I'll never fly BA again. Never. Just purely as a matter of principle now. This is chaos."
BA has been in negotiations with Unite for many months.
Workers are particularly angry that last November BA reduced the number of crew on long-haul flights and is introducing a two-year pay freeze from 2010.
The airline also proposed new contracts with lower pay for fresh recruits.
Unite says it accepts the need for BA to cut costs, but that it was not consulted on the changes.
BA suffered a loss before tax of £342m for the nine months to the end of December 2009 and says it needs to cut costs in order to survive.
How Norway dealt with its 'Bulger' case
How Norway dealt with its 'Bulger' case
| By Ray Furlong BBC Radio 4's PM programme |
 Beate says she stands by the way the boys were treated |
A Norwegian woman whose child was killed by two six-year-old boys is still glad they were not punished or removed from their families - but says 16 years on, she lives in fear of one of them.
The story has sometimes been compared to the James Bulger case in Britain, which saw two 10-year-olds take two-year-old James from a Merseyside shopping centre and murder him on a railway line.
But when five-year-old Silje Redergard was beaten and left to freeze to death by her attackers in October 1994 there was no dramatic trial.
The boys were left with their families, helped by psychiatrists and social workers. And the newspapers dropped the story.
For some, it illustrated how a progressive Norway was able to handle a child killing in a more mature way than Britain. Even the girl's mother, Beate, said she agreed to the lack of punishment.
But now, in her first broadcast interview for 10 years, she has a different perspective.
"Today I am angry, very angry. They have done things to hurt my children in the last three years. They have threatened them with violence," she says - referring in fact to only one of the boys who killed her daughter.
"We have found out that he's living in Trondheim. I haven't seen him and I hope I never will."
Memory repressed
Beate is clearly traumatised. But despite the way Silje's killer has come back to haunt her, she insists she stands by Norway's way of doing things.
"I still think that he was so little then that he didn't perhaps know that it was bad to do it," she says.
Trondheim is a quiet town on Norway's North Sea coast. The top story in the local paper is that heavy snowfall has disrupted traffic.
So you would expect Silje's story to be vividly remembered - but nearly everyone asked about it, even a woman whose daughter was six at the time, says they can not recall the case.
It almost seems as if the town has collectively repressed a traumatic memory.
 Many people in the town say they cannot remember the case |
The scene of the killing was a snow-covered housing estate on the edge of town, with kids sledging down a hill.
Tor Bordo, a journalist who covered the story for Norway's top-selling tabloid VG, revisits the site for the first time.
"I've covered hundreds of murders," he says, "but this was the only one where I couldn't sleep afterwards."
Tor, like the rest of Norway's journalists, decided to hold back from the story after a few days.
"We interviewed the parents, and we told the parents of the boys they could speak to us if they liked. But they chose not to," he says.
Did he not he feel the media had a duty to report more on the case?
"No, I think it's more important the boys were given a chance to recover, to have a normal life later on."
Interestingly, Tor says there may have also been commercial reasons. "If you cross the line, if you go too far on a story like this, sales of the paper might drop," he says.
'Playing around'
Back in town, and by pure chance, Silje's father, Geir Roar Storneth, now Beate's ex-husband, is standing outside a shop.
Like Beate, he is clearly carrying the trauma with him, even if the rest of the town has moved on.
"I've had psychological problems ever since. Depression. It goes up and down. But I got no help afterwards. I was left to my own devices," he says.
But he also said the boys had been too young to remove from their families.
"They were so small, they were playing around," he says, pulling on a roll-up. His voice trails off and he shrugs his shoulders in a gesture that speaks of resignation.
So would the authorities handle a case like this any differently today? Probably not.
| He's supposed to be rehabilitated but it doesn't seem like that to me Beate Redergard |
At the offices of the child protection services, Aase Prytz-Sloettemen has a thick file of yellowed newspaper clippings from the time of the killing.
For many years after, Aase was responsible for the care of the boys who killed Silje. But she can only talk in general terms about what the Norwegian approach is.
Social workers and child psychologists accompany them in class for a while, for the safety of the other children. There is lots of counselling, lasting months or years, before this is relaxed and the extra personnel are pulled out.
"When they do things at an early age, we will try to make it as normal as possible, so they should go to school and do all the things ordinary children do," she says.
"Norwegian society in most cases will think that a child should be treated as a child, even if it's done something very wrong."
Citing confidentiality, Aase cannot say what counselling the boys received, for how long, or how they responded. For Beate, these are crucial questions.
"He's supposed to be rehabilitated but it doesn't seem like that to me. I don't want to go to the city because I'm afraid to meet him. Even my son, who is 17, doesn't want to go to the city alone," she says.
"All of my family is suffering. I don't think we've had the same help the boys have had. I have to say that I feel like the criminal today - not the two boys."
Friday, March 19, 2010
Middle East Quartet urges Israeli settlement freeze
Middle East Quartet urges Israeli settlement freeze
Ban Ki-moon on settlements freeze
The international Quartet of Middle East peace mediators has called on Israel to freeze all settlement activity.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Israeli-Palestinian talks should lead to a peace agreement within 24 months.
Senior US, EU and Russian officials have met Mr Ban in Moscow to try to push forward the stalled talks.
Their meeting comes amid tension over Israel's announcement of new settler homes in East Jerusalem.
The announcement led the Palestinians to declare they could not begin planned indirect, or "proximity", talks with the Israelis.
| Recalling that the annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognised by the international community, the Quartet... condemns the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem Ban Ki-moon UN Secretary General |
"The Quartet urges the government of Israel to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth, dismantle outposts erected since March 2001 and to refrain from demolitions and evictions in East Jerusalem," Mr Ban said.
He was meeting the foreign ministers of the US and Russia - Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov - and the EU's new foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton.
The Quartet condemned Israel's announcement last week of planning permission for 1,600 new housing units in disputed East Jerusalem.
"Recalling that the annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognised by the international community, the Quartet underscores that the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties, and condemns the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem," Mr Ban said.
He added that peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians should result in an agreement including a Palestinian state, within 24 months.
Gaza violence
On the eve of the Quartet meeting, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu informed Washington of new confidence-building measures on the eve of the meeting but no details have been given.
Events in the Middle East on Thursday highlighted the difficulties the Quartet faces.
 Tensions are high over Israel's new settlement plans |
A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip killed a Thai agricultural worker when it hit an Israeli kibbutz.
Israeli aircraft attacked up to six targets in Gaza overnight but there were no reports of any serious casualties.
The violence came as Baroness Ashton visited Gaza - one of the highest-level visits there by a Western official since the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas took power.
Although no details of Mr Netanyahu's and Mrs Clinton's telephone conversation on Thursday have been given, enough progress was apparently made for George Mitchell, Washington's Middle East envoy, to travel to the region this weekend.
Mr Netanyahu is to visit Washington next week for further talks with Mrs Clinton.
"They discussed specific actions that might be taken to improve the atmosphere for progress toward peace," US state department spokesperson PJ Crowley said in Moscow.
It is likely this means a goodwill gesture by the Israelis, like the release of Palestinian prisoners, our correspondent says.
Mr Crowley added that Washington would now review the prime minister's response and work with Israelis and Palestinian to keep the proximity talks moving forward.
Washington wants those talks to focus on the core issues at the heart of the conflict, like borders and the status of Jerusalem, our correspondent says.
CrossTalk on MidEast: No room for peace?
CrossTalk on MidEast: No room for peace?
I love CrossTalk, it's one of my favorite shows.
Other shows like this, such as Forum, are very fun to watch and very informative.
Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' DVD Extra Preview - Union Cab of Madison
Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' DVD Extra Preview - Union Cab of Madison
Invisibility cloak created in 3-D
Invisibility cloak created in 3-D
| By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News |
Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.
The "cloak", described in the journal Science, hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.
Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible.
This is a very early but significant step towards true invisibility cloaks.
Tolga Ergin, a scientist from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany led the study.
| We put the carpet cloak on top of that bump and it bends the light so that the distortions disappear Tolga Ergin Karlsruhe Institute of Technology |
He told BBC News that his team's cloak was based on the concept that you can "transform space" with a material.
He and his colleagues designed a photonic metamaterial, which influenced the behaviour of light rays.
"You can think of any transformation that you would like to have, and tailor your material to mimic this," he explained.
The basis of the design is known as a "carpet cloak". This was first proposed by Professor Sir John Pendry from Imperial College London, who also took part in this study.
"He proposed the theoretical design of having an object hidden under a bump and making the bump disappear," said Mr Ergin.
"It's like a carpet mirror," he continued. "If you hide an object under it, there is a bump, so you see a distortion in the reflected image.
"We put the carpet cloak on top of that bump and it bends the light so that the distortions disappear.
"You have the impression that the mirror you're looking at is flat."
Bending light
The trick is to change the speed and direction in which light travels through the material - that is, to change the material's refractive index.
The researchers achieved by this using a polymer crystal made up of very tiny rods. "By changing the thickness of the rods, you can change the ratio of air to polymer," explained Dr Ergin.
"Since the refractive index of air is about one and the refractive index of the polymer is about 1.52," he explained, "in principle, we can get any refractive index between those two numbers," he said.
By tailoring the refractive index of the the surface of the bump, the scientists rendered it invisible to a wide range of light wavelengths slightly longer than those that we can see.
| We won't have a body-sized invisibility cloak tomorrow but this has demonstrated a remarkable proof of principle Professor Ortwin Hess University of Surrey |
As a result, under this light, the reflective surface appeared to be flat.
A similar effect has been achieved previously in two dimensions - changing the refractive index of a piece of silicon by drilling tiny holes in its surface.
But, these holes can only be drilled in one direction.
"So if you at look at the thing from [any other] angles, you immediately see it," said Mr Ergin.
In this case, the team used a technique called laser writing to create their 3-D cloak. This uses a very finely focused laser, to "write" into a light-sensitive material.
"Wherever you put the focus spot into the material, it will harden," explained Dr Ergin. "It's a similar process to photography - when you develop it, whatever hasn't been exposed to the laser will be washed away."
Third dimension
The carpet cloak was originally designed to work in two dimensions. But when Dr Ergin and his colleagues calculated how the rays of light would travel through an object, they realised that they could use their technique to build a structure that would work in three dimensions.
In this case, the researchers use the device to cloak a bump one micrometre (one thousandth of a millimetre) high.
"But in theory there are no limits [to the size of the object you could hide], said Dr Ergin. "You could blow this up and hide a house.
 Crystal structures influence the speed and direction of light rays |
"But it took us three hours to make this structure, so if you wanted to make it even one millimetre in size you would have to wait a very long time."
Professor Ortwin Hess from the University of Surrey in the UK said that this study was a "huge step forward".
"The really remarkable aspect is the demonstration of invisibility in three dimensions."
One of the major challenges that remains in the design of cloaking devices is hiding objects from wavelengths of light that are visible to humans.
"Photonic crystals usually work because the constitutive elements are not visible to the wavelength by which one observes them," Professor Hess explained.
"So if you look at the desk in front of you, you don't see the individual atoms because they are so small. You just see whole structure - the wood or the plastic."
This means that cloaking devices for visible light would have to be made up of much smaller rods. So for this technique, the laser beam would have to be made even smaller.
Currently, the rods can be made as small as 200 nanometres. To hide a bump from visible light would require rods as small as 10 nanometres.
And, as Mr Ergin explained, there is a limit to how small a point light can be focused down to.
"You could say, 'why not just make [the rods] smaller?' but it's not that easy to scale these structures down. Fabrication techniques have their limits," he said.
But Professor Hess said that this was a great achievement and these photonic materials could be used in the development of lenses and in light storage and optical circuitry.
He added: "We won't have a body-sized invisibility cloak tomorrow but this has demonstrated a remarkable proof of principle."