The US military is working on an "invisibility cloak" which would hide its troops from enemies.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DAPRA) announced the new invention would be made of a "smoke-like obscurant" to replace the current controversial white phosphorus which has seen some soldiers left with burnt flesh.
It is currently early days for the device but DAPRA have revealed the 'cloak' could be made up of liquid aerosol spray or engineered material, adding: "It will be deployed in specific ways to allow one-way vision through the plume."
Currently, the military's white phosphorus is used to create a screen of smoke, but has been criticised after people described getting "severe burns" for up to eight hours after using it.
Footage of the white phosphorus being used in Syria back in 2019 was shared online at the time and showed it "burning people to the bone", including a number of children.
The footage was taken when Turkey was bombing the Kurds and although the nation is banned from using chemical weapons, Hamish de-Bretton Gordon, a British chemical weapons expert, said the burns appeared consistent with white phosphorus.
The video shows a young boy taken to a hospital in Tal Tamr, near the border city of Ras al-Ayn and whose skin had eroded off.
He can be heard shouting "Dad stop the burning... I beg you" before being given a dose of morphine by medics.
DARPA's new invention would be safe to not only come in contact with, but also inhale, unlike the current obscurants which require troops using it to wear respirators on the field.
The program, dubbed Coded Visibility (CV), began in July 2022 and is set to run for the next four-and-a-half years, with many universities around the states being selected to carry out research, develop and test some obscurants.
Rohith Chandrasekar, CV program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, said: "The teams we selected aim to develop new types of non-hazardous obscurant particulates that can be tailored to provide asymmetry – that is to allow US and allied forces to see the enemy through the plume in one direction, while the adversary is unable to see through the plume in the opposite direction.
"A passive asymmetry approach will likely require multiple obscurant materials deployed in specific ways to allow one-way vision through the plume.
'We are also exploring a more fundamental challenge of demonstrating active asymmetry, which only requires a single obscurant material, but one that can be tuned in real time to potentially enable dynamic control of its properties after being deployed and in cooperation with sensors."
