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After an echolocating bat locks on to an insect with its sonar beam, it can keep track of its prey despite receiving a slew of echoes from other objects--leaves, vines and so on. How does it separate echoes bouncing off its target from echoes bouncing off the surrounding clutter, especially when the echoes reach the bat at the same time?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Suppose at some point the universe ceases to expand, and instead begins collapsing in on itself (as in the “Big Crunch” scenario), and eventually becomes a supermassive black hole. The black hole’s extreme mass produces an extremely strong gravitational field. Through a gravitational version of the so-called Schwinger mechanism, this gravitational field converts virtual particle-antiparticle pairs from the surrounding quantum vacuum into real particle-antiparticle pairs

A team of researchers at MIT has found a way to manipulate both the thermal conductivity and the electrical conductivity of materials simply by changing the external conditions, such as the surrounding temperature. And the technique they found can change electrical conductivity by factors of well over 100, and heat conductivity by more than threefold.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on -- until now.

Stare at the tiny, central black fixation spot on the white cross in a . After 30 seconds, transfer your gaze to a neutral gray background. You should see a dark--almost black--cross fading in and out.

SiriusXM Radio is devoting a limited-run channel to Charlie Sheen news, facts and the surrounding media frenzy