Neurons produce rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the brain. One of the unsettled questions in the field of neuroscience is what primarily drives these rhythmic signals, called oscillations. University of Arizona researchers have found that simply remembering events can trigger them, even more so than when people are experiencing the actual event.

The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Neuron, specifically focused on what are known as theta oscillations, which emerge in the brain’s hippocampus region during activities like exploration, navigation and sleep. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the brain’s ability to remember the past.

Prior to this study, it was believed that the external environment played a mo...

Everyday life involves the three dimensions or 3D — along an X, Y and Z axis, or up and down, left and right, and forward and back. But, in recent years scientists like Guoliang Huang, the Huber and Helen Croft Chair in Engineering at the University of Missouri, have explored a “fourth dimension” (4D), or synthetic dimension, as an extension of our current physical reality.

Now, Huang and a team of scientists in the Structured Materials and Dynamics Lab at the MU College of Engineering have successfully created a new synthetic metamaterial with 4D capabilities, including the abilit...

The source of magnetic fields has long been debated: New research offers clues on their origins. It isn’t just your refrigerator that has magnets on it. The earth, the stars, galaxies, and the space between galaxies are all magnetized, too. The more places scientists have looked for magnetic fields across the universe, the more they’ve found them. But the question of why that is the case and where those magnetic fields originate from has remained a mystery and a subject of ongoing scientific inquiry.

A new paper by Columbia researchers offers insight into the source of these fields. The team used models to show that magnetic fields may spontaneously arise in turbulent plasma...

A new review paper co-authored by two Johns Hopkins pain experts suggests that scrambler therapy, a noninvasive pain treatment, can yield significant relief for approximately 80%-90% of patients with chronic pain, and it may be more effective than another noninvasive therapy: transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). The write-up was published online July 13 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Scrambler therapy, approved by the U.S...