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Like radar, a brain wave sweeps a cortical region to read out information held in working memory

Imagine you are a security guard in one of those casino heist movies where your ability to recognize an emerging crime will depend on whether you notice a subtle change on one of the many security monitors arrayed on your desk. That’s a challenge of visual working memory.

According to a new study by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, the ability to quickly spot the anomaly could depend on a theta-frequency brain wave (3–6 Hz) that scans through a region of the cortex that maps your field of view.

The findings in animals, published in Neuron, help to explain how the brain implements visual working memory and why performance is both limited and variable.

Key nervous system components shown to influence gastrointestinal tumor growth

Australian researchers have identified two nervous system components that drive tumor growth in gastrointestinal cancers, creating promising new avenues for treatment with existing approved therapies.

Our gut contains its very own nervous system and is commonly regarded as the second brain. Key players of this system are neuropeptides, the signaling factors that are produced and released by nerves. These factors relay messages throughout our nervous system by connecting to receptors on the outside of cells, influencing a variety of processes.

The team at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI) and La Trobe School of Cancer Medicine discovered that CGRP, a common neuropeptide, and its receptor RAMP1 influence tumor growth in colorectal and stomach cancers.

Scientists discover way to pause ultrafast melting in silicon using precisely timed laser pulses

A team of physicists has discovered a method to temporarily halt the ultrafast melting of silicon using a carefully timed sequence of laser pulses. This finding opens new possibilities for controlling material behavior under extreme conditions and could improve the accuracy of experiments that study how energy moves through solids.

The research, published in the journal Communications Physics, was led by Tobias Zier and David A. Strubbe of the University of California, Merced, in collaboration with Eeuwe S. Zijlstra and Martin E. Garcia from the University of Kassel in Germany. Their work focuses on how intense, affect the atomic structure of silicon—a material widely used in electronics and solar cells.

Using , the researchers showed that a single, high-energy laser pulse typically causes silicon to melt in a fraction of a trillionth of a second.

Gene variant that protects against norovirus spread with arrival of agriculture, prehistoric DNA reveals

The arrival of agriculture coincided with a sharp rise in a gene variant that protected against the virus that causes winter vomiting, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Linköping University report after analyzing DNA from over 4,300 prehistoric individuals and cultivating “mini guts.”

Winter vomiting disease is caused by the norovirus, which is most virulent during the colder half of the year. The infection clears up after a couple of days, but the protection it provides is short-lived, meaning that the same person can repeatedly fall sick in a short space of time. But some people cannot succumb to the virus, thanks to a particular gene variant.

“We wanted to trace the historical spread of the gene variant,” says Hugo Zeberg, senior lecturer in genetics at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

A low-cost catalytic cycle could advance the separation, storage and transportation of hydrogen

Hydrogen (H2) is an Earth-abundant molecule that is widely used in industrial settings and could soon contribute to the clean generation and storage of electricity. Most notably, it can be used to generate electricity in fuel cells, which could in turn power heavy-duty vehicles or serve as back-up energy systems.

Despite its potential for various real-world applications, is often expensive to produce, store and safely transport to desired locations. Moreover, before it can be used, it typically needs to be purified, as hydrogen produced industrially is typically mixed with other gases, such as (CO), (CO₂), nitrogen (N₂) and light hydrocarbons.

Researchers at Fudan University and other institutes in China recently devised a new strategy to separate hydrogen from impurities at low temperatures, while also enabling its safe storage and transportation. Their proposed method, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, relies on a reversible chemical reaction between two that act as hydrogen carriers, enabling the reversible absorption and release of hydrogen.

Supersolid spins into synchrony, unlocking quantum insights

A supersolid is a paradoxical state of matter—it is rigid like a crystal but flows without friction like a superfluid. This exotic form of quantum matter has only recently been realized in dipolar quantum gases.

Researchers led by Francesca Ferlaino set out to explore how the solid and superfluid properties of a interact, particularly under rotation. The study is published in Nature Physics.

In their experiments, they rotated a supersolid quantum gas using a carefully controlled magnetic field and observed a striking phenomenon.

Newly discovered ‘super-Earth’ offers prime target in search for alien life

The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as Earth, and likely to be a rocky planet.

“We look for these types of planets because they are our best chance at finding life elsewhere,” said Suvrath Mahadevan, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy at Penn State and co-author of a paper about the discovery published in The Astronomical Journal.

“The exoplanet is in the habitable or the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the right distance from its star that liquid water could exist on its surface, if it has the right atmosphere.”

Scientists capture real-time melting of 2D skyrmion lattices using magnetic fields

What occurs during the melting process in two-dimensional systems at the microscopic level? Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have explored this phenomenon in thin magnetic layers.

“By utilizing skyrmions, i.e., miniature magnetic vortices, we were able to directly observe, for the first time, the transition of a two-dimensional ordered structure into a disordered state at the in real time,” explained Raphael Gruber, who conducted the research within the working group of Professor Mathias Kläui at the JGU Institute of Physics.

The findings, published in Nature Nanotechnology, are fundamental to a deeper understanding of melting processes in two dimensions and the behavior of skyrmions, which may revolutionize future data storage technologies.

Common crystal proves ideal for low-temperature light technology

Superconductivity and quantum computing are two fields that have seeped from theoretical circles into popular consciousness. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for work in superconducting quantum circuits that could drive ultra-powerful computers. But what may be less well known is that these promising technologies are often possible only at cryogenic temperatures—near absolute zero. Unfortunately, few materials can handle such extremes. Their cherished physical properties disappear when the chill is on.

In a new paper published in Science, however, a team of engineers at Stanford University spotlights a promising material—strontium titanate, or STO for short—where the optical and mechanical characteristics do not decline at extreme low temperatures, but actually get significantly better, outperforming existing materials by a wide margin.

They believe these findings suggest that STO could become the building block for new light-based and mechanical cryogenic devices that push , , and other fields to the next level.

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