Every time an autonomous drone dives to explore the ocean floor, the very armor designed to protect it simultaneously blinds its sonar. In International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Chinese researchers have solved this long-standing engineering paradox by inventing a soft, custom-molded acoustic "contact lens" that actively corrects outgoing sound waves before they pass through the drone's protective shell.

Harvard researchers have built a device called a pico-calorimeter that directly measures heat signals from small groups of living cells. 

Experimental atomic physicists have discovered there is a maximum amount of electrical resistance, or resistivity, that can result from collisions between electrons. A team from the University of Toronto, L’École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania studied ultracold potassium atoms cooled to near absolute zero. They found when increasing the rate at which atoms collide, the resulting resistance eventually stops increasing, offering new insights into what causes resistivity at the microscopic level.