You know how it works: You stand in the grocery aisle, surreptitiously sniffing the cantaloupes, hoping your nose will lead you to a nice, ripe selection. But when you slice it open in your kitchen, it’s just not as ripe as you had hoped. Lucky for you (and me), Assistant Professor Florence Negre-Zakharov and her team might have found a way to make imperfectly ripe fruit a thing of the past. The method was published in the March 30 edition of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

"We are involved in a project geared towards developing rapid methods to evaluate ripeness and flavor of fruits," explained Negre-Zakharov, who...