The design and use of metamaterials have shown exciting applications in electrical engineering, physics, optics, and other science fields that are expanding our physical understanding and leading to unprecedented performance of many standard devices such as antennas, microwave circuits, and sensors. The manufacturing of metamaterials, while ingenious, has typically been exotic and depended on the inclusion of sub-wavelength particles in a host medium to tailor the effective characteristics of a material. This work verifies a much more simple approach to realizing a kind of metamaterial, the epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterial. The intriguing aspect of this metamaterial is that while it is simple to realize, it is a novel approach to many practical applications such as the tunneling energy through highly discontinuous bends and abruptions, cloaking of sensors, miniaturization of microwave components, and design of highly directive antennas. Further, the physics and mathematical formulation of these ENZ materials is both intriguing and counterintuitive. / text