When she was a young graduate student in biotechnology, Luísa Vasconcelos decided to do neuroscience research for a living. She hasn’t stopped since. At the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, she studies the underpinnings of innate behavior.

Behavior allows us to study a problem at several levels, and this is attractive because, ultimately, it is rewarding to see the whole picture. – Luísa Vasconcelos

Carlos Ribeiro and Leopoldo Petreanu have been awarded Health Research la Caixa Grants of nearly 500,000 euros each to coordinate scientific projects. The grants are attributed to by the Foundation of la Caixa bank, Spain’s third largest financial institution. This is the first edition to include project coordinators working in Portugal.

A third researcher, Mireia Castilho, has been awarded 25,000 euros to collaborate with another la Caixa-funded project, this one coordinated by a group based in Bilbao, Spain.

How can scarce resources sustain the multitude of species that exists on Earth? Despite recent progress, this enigma of biodiversity has not yet been solved. Now, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal, developed a new mathematical model which may be the answer.

These ideas are still largely theoretical, so we need to test how well the competition mechanisms proposed in the paper describe what happens when real species compete, but early results look quite promising. – Andres Laan

Fight, flee, or freeze; when faced with a threat, everyone, from mice to humans, are certain to choose one of these three strategies. Though critical for survival, we are still at a loss as to how the brain chooses which strategy to apply in any given instance. In this new study, a team of scientists at CR not only identified variables that lead the brain to apply a specific strategy, but also uncovered a particular pair of neurons crucial for this process.

A team at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown has been awarded a Proof of Concept grant of 149.820 euros by the European Research Council (ERC) to develop a prototype for a new system of behaviour analysis, based on sensors similar to those used in cell phones to detect movement, that will make it possible to accurately and automatically measure human behavior related to nervous system disorders.

How can our brain discriminate and identify a particular face among a virtually infinite number of extremely similar faces? Doris Tsao discovered how neurons in our brain encode faces. With her team, she effectively “cracked the neural code” – the Rosetta Stone, as she calls it – for faces. Recently, she came to the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown to talk about her work.

We think that, physically, the brain’s mechanism for coding faces is exactly like the RGB code for colors. – Doris Tsao

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: Raphael Steinfeld
Lab: Circuit Dynamics & Computation
Project: Dynamics of auditory cortex in decision making and task engagement

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Photo credit: Tor Stensola

The brain has a way to keep nervous activity in check as we learn new things and consolidate memories. Otherwise, it would gradually “saturate”, losing its ability to store any information at all. But doesn’t such a need for stability in turn limit our memory and learning powers? A new study now sheds light on this enigma.

The antidepressant effect of repetitive magnetic transcranial stimulation (rTMS) lasts longer when the initial treatment is followed by maintenance sessions, concludes a study led by scientists from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), and now published in the journal Brain Stimulation.

While trying to figure out how connections between neurons change with experience to give rise to learning, the Neural Circuits and Behaviour Lab accidentally stumbled upon an important finding: the existence of a strong link between walking speed and learning speed in mice.