But there’s more! During the interview, they also told us about great places to visit, cool music, fascinating podcasts and other discoveries they made this year. We couldn’t fit everything in the final cut, so we’ve listed their top recommendations below.

To view all 2021 individual episodes, tune in to the Zoom-In on Champalimaud YouTube playlist.

Smell has the power to transport us across time and space. It could be the sweet fragrance of jasmine, or the musty scent of algae. Suddenly, you are back at your childhood home, or under the burning sun of a distant shore.

This association between smells and places seems to be a deeply embedded aspect of human cognition. But how are the two linked in the brain? A study published today (December 22nd) in the scientific journal Nature presents a potential explanation.

A series of landmark studies by Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, Director of the Champalimaud Cancer Research Programme, led to the formation of LiMM Therapeutics in 2018. The young company is geared towards generating first-in-class therapeutic products for cancer, inflammatory, and metabolic diseases. 

Once in a while, we hear that the Physics world is overjoyed with the discovery of a new elementary particle, often decades after theoretical models have predicted its existence. But Neuroscience news has a different stroke, with novel insight mainly emerging through experiments. Can theoretical approaches also provide testable predictions about how the brain works? 

Nearly all types of cancers have the potential to form metastatic growths. However, the exact moment when metastasis emerges is highly variable. While some patients develop metastatic disease soon after the primary tumour appears, others can see decades pass before it happens. What is the source of this variability? 

A team of researchers from the Champalimaud Foundation partnered with a group of street artists and created a set of artistic-scientific workshops that will take place during the afternoon of Saturday, 27th November, at the Junta de Freguesia das Águas Livres, in Cova da Moura - Amadora, open to all children and teenagers from this neighbourhood.

When analysing medical images, it is important to understand that they are more than pictures, they are data – and that a large amount of this data is not visually available. This means that a purely qualitative, visual analysis of these images may have variable interpretations and may not be enough to capture the heterogeneity within the structure being imaged. 

The sound of an accelerating heartbeat can instantly send chills down your spine. You know that sound means trouble. We are so accustomed to the way our hearts seem to continuously mirror how we feel that we can easily imagine different hearts racing, aching or skipping a beat. 

But do the hearts of other animals actually follow the same rules when in danger? When it comes to our fellow vertebrates – frogs, cats, antelope – the answer has been long-known to be “yes”. But what about insects? 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it had quickly become apparent that disease severity is tightly correlated with age. Age, however, is not the only factor. There are multiple cases of older people who were spared and younger individuals who died. A team of international scientists, including Eduardo Moreno, of the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, decided to investigate the reason for that.