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Metamaterials have attracted a great amount of interest, owing to a number of appealing applications such as cloaking. The use of superconducting components now enables the fabrication of metamaterials that could be used to cloak static magnetic fields rather than oscillating light waves.
Mixing granular materials such as sand with a liquid leads to stiffening, but the mechanical properties are surprisingly independent of the amount of liquid. This phenomenon is shown to result from the particular organization of the liquid into open structures within the granular pile.