Who are today’s scientists? Inspired by the project “Humans of New York”, Ar Magazine turns the spotlight on individual humans of science every month.

Chemotherapy is an important, life-saving treatment for breast cancer. But it’s not risk free. While some of its side effects are short-term and reversible, others are not and could even result in severe repercussions to the patient’s health. It is therefore of paramount importance that doctors would be able to assess whether the benefits of administering chemotherapy outweigh the risks on a case by case basis.

It is a part of every waking moment of our lives. But whenever scientists have tried to study it, consciousness has slipped through their fingers. Will we ever understand why we have it and how it arises in our brains?

“There seems to be a big gap between the physical universe, that has these objective properties, and one’s own feelings, sensations – this inner world that no one else has any access to. These two things seem to have nothing to do with one another.” – Zach Mainen

Who are today’s scientists? Inspired by the project “Humans of New York”, Ar Magazine turns the spotlight on individual humans of science every month.

Name: Roberto Keller
Affiliation: National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon

More…

Photo credit: Marina Fridman

Twenty to 30 percent of patients with depression are estimated to be unresponsive or intolerant to antidepressive drugs. But when these patients are submitted to a few weeks’ sessions of a non-invasive technique called “repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation”, or rTMS, the clinical state of 41,5 to 56,4 percent of them substantially improves and between 26,5 e 28,7 percent are no longer depressed (the numbers vary according to the assessment scale being used).

Portuguese scientists have for the first time shown that the larvae of a tiny fish could one day become the preferred model for predicting, in advance, the response of human malignant tumors to the various therapeutic drugs used to fight cancer.

I was always “very frustrated about the fact although we have so much technology, we can put people on the moon etc., if someone has a tumor we still don’t know which drug is best for that specific tumor. – Rita Fior

New research has revealed that deep in the brain, in a structure called striatum, all possible movements that an animal can do are represented in a map of neural activity. Similar movements have similar coordinates, being represented closer in the map, while actions that are more different have more distant coordinates and are further away.
__

Scientists at the Immunophysiology Lab have discovered that neurons located at mucosal tissues can immediately detect an infection in the organism, promptly producing a substance that acts as an “adrenaline rush” for immune cells.

Nobody could have imagined that the nervous system coordinates, commands and controls the immune response throughout the whole organism. It’s one of the fastest and most powerful immune reactions we have ever seen. – Henrique Veiga-Fernandes

Eugenia Chiappe, principal investigator of the Sensorimotor Integration Lab, is one of the five scientists in Portugal who have been awarded this year a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

The use of identical experimental procedures will eliminate the differences that normally hinder replication of data across laboratories. In this way, we will be able to pool data as if it were a single giant experiment, even though it is in fact distributed between two continents. – Zachary Mainen

To understand how billions of neurons work together in a single brain, twenty-one laboratories join forces under the umbrella of the International Brain Laboratory to conduct a unique joint experiment.