Blocking radio waves and electromagnetic interference with the flip of a switch

My immediate (i.e. unconsidered) thought is a solid state zone plate (like a radio version of a Fresnel lens) which can be used for adjustable focusing or steering of incident radio waves.

It does seem a little weird, yeah. I mean, the researchers are from Drexel University. I would've figured that the applications that they would be most interested in would be fast optical switching and MEMS devices - whereas in this press release it seems like they're trying to "sex" up the findings by suggesting that they can be used to make a Romulan cloaking device for macroscopic antennas.

This article might have suffered at the hands of an overenthusiastic PR team.

You wouldn't put shielding around an antenna, that kind of defeats the purpose of being an antenna.

The thing about circuits that work at GHz frequencies, is that the wavelengths are small enough that practically any part of your circuit can absorb EM, so it would be handy if the enclosure had this shielding effect.

bounced radio waves are fair game. IANAL.