Even though they have a tiny brain, honeybees are amazingly good at finding their way in a complex environment. What do we know about it and why should we care (even if we don’t like honey)?

When I started working in this field I thought: why would a tissue as indispensable as the brain – we will never be able to replace the brain – have given up the opportunity to be assisted by the immune system? It doesn’t make sense.

Using a computerised visualisation technique newly developed at their lab by Verónica Corrales-Carvajal, the team led by Carlos Ribeiro “dissected” the impact of diet on the feeding choices and food-seeking strategies of fruit flies.

“The alteration of risk-taking behaviors under the influence of diet can have profound implications, affecting exploration behaviors not related to food seeking. It is likely a more general phenomenon, also taking place in other contexts.” – Carlos Ribeiro

The precise sense of self-movement is an important part of our sense of self. No sensory experience is possible without movement. – Eugenia Chiappe, principal investigator of the Sensorimotor Integration Lab.

Sabine Renninger still remembers the day she had her first samples under the microscope in school. The possibility of expanding her view of the world and zooming into the unknown was something that started fascinating her early on.

We’ll have 10 labs doing the same experiments, with the same gear, the same computer programs. The data we will obtain will go into the cloud and be shared by the 20 labs. It’ll be almost as a global lab, except it will be distributed geographically. – Zach Mainen

Monogamous mice are more parental in general, and dads are just as good as moms at caring for their young. This is in stark contrast with the promiscuous species, in which the moms are ok but the dads are very poor at providing care.

In a universe with parallel lives, we could have found Christian Machens hidden behind a pile of books, immersed in the plot of his most recent novel. Or leaning over a piano compulsively searching for the last set of tones of his newest symphony. But at the age of 18, Christian decided to take the “safe bet”, in his own words, and study physics.

Pleasure, pain, hormones, nature, nurture… There are many players that determine when or even if sex happens. In this short series, Susana Lima, head of the Neuroethology lab at Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, tells us about her work on cracking the neural circuits that wire up sexual behaviour.

“These results demonstrate that the activity of the neurons [we studied] was sufficient to alter the way the animals judged the passage of time. – Joe Paton, principal investigator of the Learning Lab.