Researchers from the Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Portugal, strive to understand how social context influences the individual's response to threats. 

Previously, they have shown that when fruit flies in a group are faced with an inescapable threat, they lower their defences compared to when alone. They further observed that if the other flies freeze, then so will the individual; when the group starts moving again, the individual quickly follows. Being in tune with the surrounding flies seems to bring security.

A study performed by the team of haematologist Cristina João, who leads the Myeloma and Lymphoma Research Group at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, suggests that it may be possible, in a near future, to diagnose and monitor the progression of multiple myeloma (MM) by simply using a blood sample. Their results were published today (21/06/2022) in the journal Frontiers in Oncology.

One of the most devastating aspects of stroke and traumatic brain injury is that the neurons we lose are never replaced. This means that depending on the injury site, patients may suffer long-term impairments of crucial motor or cognitive functions, such as language and memory. 

If you were a kid in the 80s, or are a fan of retro video games, then you must know Frogger. The game can be quite a challenge. To win, you must first survive a stream of heavy traffic, only to then narrowly escape oblivion by zig-zagging across speeding wooden logs. How does the brain know what to focus on within all this mess? 

Thanks to technological advances, neuroscientists can now collect mouth-watering amounts of data, simultaneously recording the activity of hundreds of neurons in real-time. But what's the use of having this "big neuro data" if we can't make sense of it?

Today, the general view about the role emotions play in our lives has radically evolved, and the importance of emotions throughout the animal kingdom has finally been recognised. Charles Darwin already intuited 150 years ago when he wrote that emotions are “a universal means of communication” across the animal kingdom. As for us humans, we now know that emotions literally shape every aspect of our lives, including things as unique to our species as rationality and morality.

Who hasn't felt the temptation to fling a lengthy manual into the bin, or just drive on instead of asking for directions? After all, following instructions is often tiresome, and we can just figure it out on our own… Or can we? A study published today (May 19th) in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour challenges prevalent theories about our capacity to solve complex problems and how certain mental disorders influence it.

Sabine Renninger

POST DOCTORAL RESEARCHER, VISION TO ACTION LAB

"Have you ever walked to school or work and suddenly seen something that has always been there but that you never noticed before? Since childhood, such moments have made me wonder about what the world really looks like and what is just my perception of it.

A fruit fly walks on a small styrofoam ball fashioned into a floating 3D treadmill. The room is completely dark, and yet, an electrode recording visual neurons in the fly’s brain relays a mysterious stream of neural activity, rising and falling like a sinusoidal wave.

When Eugenia Chiappe, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Foundation in Portugal, first saw these results, she had a hunch her team had made an exceptional discovery. They were recording from visual neurons, but the room was dark, so there was no visual signal that could drive the neurons in that manner. 

The team, headed by Manuel Valiente from CNIO, which counts with the contributions of scientists from other Research Centres, namely the Champalimaud Foundation, found that a simple blood test can help detect patients with resistance to brain radiotherapy and identified a drug that might reverse it. A multi-centre clinical study is now under way to validate the predictive potential of this biomarker through the National Brain Metastasis Network (Spanish acronym: RENACER).

The study is being published in Nature Medicine this week.