A study published today (July 6th) in the journal Nature, uncovers how the brain stops us from jumping the gun. "We discovered a brain area responsible for driving action and another for suppressing that drive. We could also trigger impulsive behaviour by manipulating neurons in these areas", said the study's senior author, Joe Paton, Director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme in Portugal.

Aside from Raquel Oliveira and Carlos Ribeiro, who conduct their research at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and Champalimaud Foundation, respectively, 56 other EMBO Members have been elected this year, coming from 15 different Member States of the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC), EMBO’s intergovernmental funding body.

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.

On June 8th, at 19h00, the Champalimaud Foundation opens the exhibition 'Insight Inside', the latest work by Clo Bourgard, in which the artist questions how our inner world brings us closer to nature and the environment, through pieces of art made exclusively with recycled materials.

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?