The precise sense of self-movement is an important part of our sense of self. No sensory experience is possible without movement. – Eugenia Chiappe, principal investigator of the Sensorimotor Integration Lab.

Sabine Renninger still remembers the day she had her first samples under the microscope in school. The possibility of expanding her view of the world and zooming into the unknown was something that started fascinating her early on.

We’ll have 10 labs doing the same experiments, with the same gear, the same computer programs. The data we will obtain will go into the cloud and be shared by the 20 labs. It’ll be almost as a global lab, except it will be distributed geographically. – Zach Mainen

Monogamous mice are more parental in general, and dads are just as good as moms at caring for their young. This is in stark contrast with the promiscuous species, in which the moms are ok but the dads are very poor at providing care.

In a universe with parallel lives, we could have found Christian Machens hidden behind a pile of books, immersed in the plot of his most recent novel. Or leaning over a piano compulsively searching for the last set of tones of his newest symphony. But at the age of 18, Christian decided to take the “safe bet”, in his own words, and study physics.

Pleasure, pain, hormones, nature, nurture… There are many players that determine when or even if sex happens. In this short series, Susana Lima, head of the Neuroethology lab at Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, tells us about her work on cracking the neural circuits that wire up sexual behaviour.

“These results demonstrate that the activity of the neurons [we studied] was sufficient to alter the way the animals judged the passage of time. – Joe Paton, principal investigator of the Learning Lab.

In the first part of this 3-part series, Susana Lima told us about her work on mate choice, a process by which individuals find “the one”. But as we all know, just because we think we found “the one” today, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll be in the mood to see them again tomorrow, not to mention for the rest of our lives… Why is that? What internal changes make us respond differently to the same person? More…

To get a PhD is to become the world-expert on a problem people don’t even know they have – yet. – Zach Mainen, director of Champalimaud Research.

“The brain seems to have an endogenous capacity to repair itself after it’s injured. So we wondered: what if there is a way to amplify, to take advantage of, to interact with this spontaneous healing capacity?” – John Krakauer, BLAM Lab, Johns Hopkins University

John Krakauer, neuroscientist and stroke rehabilitation specialist in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins, says he still feels like “uma criança”. And he says it in Portuguese because… he actually spent his childhood in Portugal and grew to love it.