The Champalimaud Foundation opens the applications to the 5th edition of the Fundamentals of Medicine Postgratuate Course, a unique course designed for life sciences researchers interested in exploring medical terminology, concepts, and issues, with a focus on fostering collaboration between researchers and medical doctors. 

The Hands-on Molecular Tools workshop aims to cover the fundamental principles and standard techniques used in Molecular Biology and will be taught by experts from CF, FCT-UNL and FCUL/cE3c.

This course will incorporate theoretical and practical classes, where the participants will acquire experience on RNA extraction, cDNA synthesis, PCR, restriction enzyme digestion, electrophoresis, plasmid DNA isolation, as well as, bioinformatics analysis and experimental design of a cloning project. 

The symposium, themed Neuro-Cybernetics at Scale, draws inspiration from the recent advances in AI and machine learning, where scaling has unlocked unprecedented performance. We believe neuroscience may be approaching a similar inflection point. By convening researchers in experimental neuroscience, robotics, machine learning, control theory, and theoretical neuroscience, we aim to explore how ideas of scaling and feedback can shape the future of systems neuroscience.

Host

Naz Belkaya, MSc, Circuit Dynamics and Computation

Venue

Seminar room

It was a happy coincidence: the final text of the Recommendations of the Multidisciplinary and Multiprofessional Working Group on the Clinical Use of Psychedelic Substances was released on the same day that the Portuguese National Health System announced its decision to fully reimburse the treatment of resistant depression with a substance called esketamine.

In Episode 2, Sian Harding, a world leader in cardiac research, joins Hedi to reveal the heart as you’ve never seen it before, as they discuss her book The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart. From how social rank, air pollution, noise, and even your mother’s pregnancy diet can shape heart health, to the heart’s mini-brain or growing hearts in the lab from skin cells, they uncover the remarkable ways this muscular organ does far more than “just” pump blood.

Host

Ana Luísa Correia, PhD, Cancer Dormancy & Immunity

Venue

Seminar room

An international team, led by researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), has shown – for the first time in a realistic way – that it may be possible, in the future, to diagnose Parkinson’s disease (PD) years earlier, by scanning people’s brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Although there are treatment options after diagnosis, there is no cure.  Therapies are continually improving — with ongoing research aiming to slow or even alter the course of the disease - investing in the research of methods that enable much earlier diagnosis is crucial.

Following Episode 1 - Part 1, this second part of Hedi’s conversation with science writer Moheb Costandi unpacks how our sense of agency – the feeling of being in control of our actions and responsible for their outcomes – can be disrupted in conditions like Alien Hand Syndrome and Schizophrenia, manipulated on the operating table, or even altered in the lab.

When a fruit fly is navigating straight forward at high speed, why does it know that it’s not straying off course? Because as long as the fly moves directly forward, the visual scene shifts from front to back in a near-perfect mirror image across both retinas – generating, in other words, a symmetrical visual motion pattern. This pattern, known as “optic flow”, provides a powerful cue for detecting self-motion and maintaining direction.