For most of his scientific career, Alfonso Renart has been working at the frontier between computational and experimental neuroscience, developing mathematical models that try to explain salient properties of the activity of neurons in cortical circuits and how these embody the computations that underlie cognition.

I feel like I’m still very much searching for a way to describe the essence of what it means to be a living organism in purely physical terms. – Alfonso Renart

Idtracker.ai is a mix of conventional algorithms and artificial intelligence developed at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. From the video footage of a moving crowd composed of dozens of individuals, it learns to identify each and every individual in that crowd. The Collective Behavior lab has now shown that it takes about an hour for idtracker.ai to identify each and every one of 100 zebrafish in a video, at all times, with almost 100% accuracy.

The innate capacity to discern between an appetizing and a foul – i.e. dangerous – odor is essential, from the start, to guide behavior for survival. Until now, little was known about how these innate olfactory responses are hard-wired in the brain. A team of neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown has performed one of the first studies into the central neural circuits that underlie these innate responses.

How do our brains know when and where to place our feet in order to prevent us from tripping each time we find ourselves on a new terrain such as a icy path, or a sandy beach? In an innovative study, the Neural Circuits and Behaviour Lab, finds remarkable similarities between the way humans and mice learn to adapt their manner of walking and pinpoint a site in the brain that controls two components crucial for mastering this task – space and time.

How do our brains know when and where to place our feet in order to prevent us from tripping each time we find ourselves on a new terrain such as an icy path, or a sandy beach?

In an innovative study, scientists from the Neural Circuits and Behaviour lab (careylab.org), find remarkable similarities between the way humans and mice learn to adapt their manner of walking and pinpoint a site in the brain that controls two components crucial for mastering this task – space and time.

When rectal cancer infiltrates adjacent lymph nodes, patients may have a better clinical outcome if chemotherapy or radiotherapy are administered prior to the standard surgery to remove the tumour. However, the status of these lymph nodes can only be precisely assessed upon removal during surgery.

A multidisciplinary team of scientists and clinicians at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, developed a new noninvasive MRI methodology, called SPI (Susceptibility Perturbation MRI), that is able to identify whether lymph nodes have been infiltrated by malignant cells with high accuracy in rectal cancer patients.

Such a characterisation can help define treatment strategy for rectal cancer patients and may have future implications for other malignancies.

optoPAD is a newly developed system for creating virtual taste realities. It combines advanced optical and genetic techniques with touch-screen technology to monitor and control feeding behaviors and taste sensations in fruit flies. This new tool, which is now being freely shared with the scientific community, significantly extends the toolset available to study feeding behavior in this model organism, which in turn may provide important insight into the neural circuitry that underlies food choice.

Suppressing the capacity of tumours to destroy the healthy tissue that surrounds them is essential for fighting cancer-induced morbidity and mortality. Now, a new study by the Cell Fitness lab in human-derived tumours reveals a potential way of doing just that. The study reveals a competition mechanism used by human cancer cells for killing their neighbours and demonstrates that combining substances that block this mechanism with chemotherapy results in more effective tumour elimination.

Weber’s law is the most firmly established rule of psychophysics — the science that relates the strength of physical stimuli to the sensations of the mind. Despite being almost 200 years old, no clear way has been found to select among its many proposed explanations. Now, the Circuit Dynamics & Computation lab has discovered a new psychophysical rule that allowed them to identify a unique and robust explanation of Weber’s law.