Understanding a natural cloaking mechanism

Researchers at Yale and in Europe are exploring a natural "cloaking" mechanism that allows certain elastic materials—think Jell-O, for instance—to imbibe substantial amounts of liquid droplets without changing their own mechanical properties. Writing in the May 18 online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, John Wettlaufer and his colleagues expanded on previous work about surface tension to find the limits of such natural cloaking.