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.

At long last, this year CR researchers were finally able to celebrate Brain Awareness Week in the best way possible - doing science with kids! The activities took place over two days, one at a school in Amadora and the other at Lisbon’s Science Centre, called “Pavilhão do Conhecimento”. 

We've all been there… Trying to reach an actual person when calling customer support, getting a baby to fall asleep, looking for something good to watch on TV… At some point, you invariably find yourself wondering -- do my actions actually make a difference? 

Fruit flies have played a leading role in biological research for over a century, ever since Thomas Hunt Morgan used these tiny insects to discover that genes reside on chromosomes, essentially uncovering the mechanical basis of heredity. Many scientists followed in Morgan’s footsteps and several went on to win a Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking discoveries using this small model organism.

Ana Luísa Correia joined the CF in December 2021. Prior to that, she worked for several years at the Basel University Hospital in Switzerland. During her stay there, she made breakthrough discoveries with potentially important therapeutic implications. She intends to pursue this line of work at the CF.

Learning new motor skills is a critical aspect of our lives. From playing the piano to riding a bike, it would be difficult to imagine life without it. But how does the brain do it? A new study published in the scientific journal Science Advances sheds light on a newly discovered brain circuit that may endow us with this remarkable ability.

What was your thesis question and what did you find?

My original thesis question was ‘How do we read mental states from facial expressions?’ However, a few months after presenting it, my PhD project changed 180 degrees and the final question ended up being ‘How can deep learning help to understand collective behaviour in zebrafish?’ We found that deep learning is a very po