The quickest way to decide if a watermelon is ripe or not is by tapping on it. And if you're having trouble detecting the subtleties of the sound, listen to some Nigerian traditional music to get your ears attuned, says an international group of physics and music researchers.

Current technologies for information transfer and processing are challenged by fundamental physical limits. The more powerful they become, the more energy they need, and the more heat is released to the environment. Also, there are physical limits on the smallness and efficiency of communication devices. The recent discovery by physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Lanzhou University in China offers a new route for progress on these issues.

Dark matter is an unknown type of matter present in the universe that could be of particle origin. One of the most complete theoretical frameworks that includes a dark matter candidate is supersymmetry. Many supersymmetric models predict the existence of a new stable, invisible particle called the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), which has the right properties to be a dark matter particle. 

Apollo's astronauts captured images that remain icons of the Space Age.

Solar cells made of perovskite hold much promise for the future of solar energy. However, the material degrades quickly, severely limiting its efficiency and stability over time. Researchers have discovered that adding a small amount of fluoride to the perovskite leaves a protective layer, increasing stability of the materials and the solar cells significantly.

Engineers have measured the accuracy of silicon two-qubit operations for the first time -- and their results confirm the promise of silicon for quantum computing.

Advances in IT technologies are hampered by the ever increasing demand for energy and by fundamental limits on miniaturization. Energy dissipation mostly going into heating up the environment is also a challenge. A new type of spin waves may serve to overcome these obstacles.

In the past several decades, militaries have worked hard to develop technologies that simultaneously protect infantry soldiers' hearing and aid in battlefield communication. However, these advanced Tactical Communication and Protective Systems, or TCAPS—earmuffs or earplugs with built-in microphones allowing active hearing protection—don't help if a soldier takes them off to assess the location of incoming gunfire.

In a recent study, a team of researchers has presented new direct-detection constraints on eV-to-GeV dark matter interacting with electrons, using a new prototype detector developed as part of the Sub-Electron-Noise Skipper-CCD Experimental Instrument (SENSEI) project. The SENSEI collaboration is comprised of researchers from several institutions, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Stony Brook University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Oregon.

During World War I, William Lawrence Bragg led a team of engineers in the development of an acoustic method to locate enemy artillery, work that was so successful that it was soon used widely throughout the British army.