Ulf Leonhardt is riding high these days, with a new award from the Royal Society of Great Britain to further develop his ideas on how to make things in plain sight disappear. Born in East Germany and now occupying the theoretical physics chair at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, Leonhardt is among the leaders of the worldwide race to realize an old dream of science fiction: cloaking devices. They would steer light or other electromagnetic waves around them like water around a stone in a smooth stream, leaving nary a ripple of difference in the flow. Such things, letting light swish ... (p. 18)

COVER STORY: Scientists probe debris trapped by white dwarfs to learn more about what faraway Earthlike planets are made of. (p. 22)

It was like the cavalry had shown up. Twenty years ago, newspapers and broadcasters burst with news from the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City delivering what seemed a miracle. Its name was cold fusion. Its lure was simple: inexhaustible, clean and affordable energy. A news conference is not a very professional way to introduce scientists to a major development in a field they’ve never even heard of. But university officials, spooked by fear that a rival researcher at nearby Brigham Young University might have stolen the idea, unloaded it hurriedly for the TV cameras... (p. 20)

If asked to name stupendously amazing things in space, most people would probably pick black holes. These evil-tinged clowns of the universe are definite wows. Insatiable is their middle name. Grand and merciless, voracious and monstrous, pure appetite and deep mystery. The biggest fatten themselves in galaxy cores mainly via a seemingly limitless hunger for a main source of sustenance: fat, circular wads of gas that gather around the black holes and are sometimes given a name to delight any glutton, Polish doughnuts. Black holes cloak their innards behind an “event horiz... (p. 18)