Using "cloaking" techniques to shield buildings from seismic shock waves:

...[Physicist Sebastian] Guenneau said that it's possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren't there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in afast-flowing river, he said. "It's the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it's bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock." The object, or building, is "invisible" to the mechanical waves.