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The New York Times wrote:

And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak.

Screw that. I want a Philosopher's Stone.

(BTW: Does anyone know why the first one was called "H.P. & the Sorcerer's Stone" in the US?)

Under ideal fabrication conditions, this might be reduced to as little as six percent per micrometer. Nevertheless, when you consider that a windowpane reflects about four percent of the incident radiation, you can see why even six percent is too high to render anything invisible. If anything, it will be easy to spot, as humans pick out reflections and flashes, meaning that this would probably draw more attention than good camouflage.

So, if this isn't a material for making you invisible what is it good for? It's the basic material we need for beating the diffraction limit. Negative index materials are not subject to the diffraction limit, meaning that light can be focused to smaller volumes. This implies that we would be able to illuminate cellular machinery at the level of individual molecules or perhaps even individual atoms. It would even be possible to use direct chemical imaging, instead of relying on fluorescent labels. This one application, which may well be attainable with the technology the authors used in their demonstration, should be enough for anyone to get excited about.