Who are today’s scientists? Inspired by the project “Humans of New York”, Ar Magazine turns the spotlight on individual humans of science every month.

Name: Raphael Steinfeld
Lab: Circuit Dynamics & Computation
Project: Dynamics of auditory cortex in decision making and task engagement

More…

Photo credit: Tor Stensola

The brain has a way to keep nervous activity in check as we learn new things and consolidate memories. Otherwise, it would gradually “saturate”, losing its ability to store any information at all. But doesn’t such a need for stability in turn limit our memory and learning powers? A new study now sheds light on this enigma.

The antidepressant effect of repetitive magnetic transcranial stimulation (rTMS) lasts longer when the initial treatment is followed by maintenance sessions, concludes a study led by scientists from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), and now published in the journal Brain Stimulation.

While trying to figure out how connections between neurons change with experience to give rise to learning, the Neural Circuits and Behaviour Lab accidentally stumbled upon an important finding: the existence of a strong link between walking speed and learning speed in mice.

Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, principal investigator of the Immunophysiology Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), is the first Portuguese (as well as the first scientist working in Portugal) ever to receive an Allen Distinguished Investigator award, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group announced. The Paul G.

Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown is one of the first institutions participating in a new programme of the Gulbenkian Foundation, called “Academias Gulbenkian do Conhecimento”. This programme targets children and young people up to 25 years of age, with the goal of creating novel approaches that will equip the participants to successfully navigate our rapidly changing world. The application to the programme has been a competitive one, with 589 project applications from all across Portugal that resulted in the selection of only 34 projects, reflecting a success rate of about 5%.

How can virtual reality be used to study how the brain works? In this episode of Science Snapshots, Eugenia Chiappe, head of the Sensorimotor Integration lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, explains how virtual reality helped her lab discover how the brain integrates visual and motor information in order to navigate the world.

Marta Moita, Deputy Director of the Champalimaud Research Programme and group leader of the Behavioural Neuroscience lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon – Portugal, was awarded a two million euros grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to advance her innovative work on the neural basis of defensive behaviours.

Despite decades of cancer research, the early phases of tumour progression that connect the appearance of few abnormal cells to the formation of a clinically detectable tumour mass remains poorly understood. It was previously proposed that certain mutations could give a competitive advantage to a subset of cells that would enable them to kill and replace their neighbours, thereby initiating a cancerous tumour. Yet, the mechanisms at the basis of such competition were not clear.

For the first time, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, Portugal, have shown that neuronal cell death in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may actually not be a bad thing – on the contrary, it may be the result of a cell quality control mechanism trying to protect the brain from the accumulation of malfunctioning neurons.