Which of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?
A.
Researchers inspired by observing mirages on hot roads have applied the underlying physical principles to develop a new process to cloak objects from microwaves.
B.
Researchers have invented a process to cloak objects from microwaves through the use of a novel engineered material that bends microwaves at extreme angles.
C.
Both the occurrence of mirages on hot roads and the cloaking of microwaves through a newly invented process result from the bending of light at extreme angles.
D.
Microwaves and visible light both conform to a set of physical laws that explain mirages on hot roads.
E.
The movement of EMR around an object can be controlled by metal shapes like loops, coils, or tiny rectangles.
Consider a mirage on a hot toad: when light rays hit the hot air just above the surface, they bend. Although light moves through a vacuum at a certain constant speed, it moves more slowly through any transparent medium, such as water or gas. Light travels faster in the thin air near the road than it does in the colder, denser air above, and the difference in speed makes it shift direction as it crosses the boundary between the two. Rays once headed downwards from the sky are redirected to your eye, hiding part of the road with a shimmering image.
A research team has constructed an apparatus to cloak an object from electromagnetic radiation (EMR)—in this case, microwaves—making the object "invisible" to microwave-based detection devices, somewhat as a mirage on a hot road makes the road invisible. The apparatus bends incoming microwaves around the object, using a class of recently created metamaterials—materials that gain certain desired properties directly from their engineered structures rather than from their composition. These metamaterials possess the ability, not found in nature, to bend microwaves at extreme angles. The metamaterial in this case—thin, rigid sheets of fiberglass insulator stamped with conducting loops, coils, and tiny rectangles—was designed to control the movement of incoming EMR.
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