Squid Liquid Suit

Researchers from the UC Irvine’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering have created the world’s best camouflage suit. The suit can avoid being detected by infrared cameras and mimic the squid’s skin. The new suit is based on the pencil squids also known as calamari.

The suit is a biometric infrared camouflage coating. The researchers created reflectin in common bacteria, a structural protein essential for the squid’s ability to change colour and reflect light, and used it to make thin, optically active films that mimic the skin of a squid.

The scientists say that with the appropriate chemical stimuli, the films’ coloration and reflectance can shift back and forth giving them a dynamic configurability that allows the films to disappear and reappear when visualised with an infrared camera.