Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, principal investigator of the Immunophysiology Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), is the first Portuguese (as well as the first scientist working in Portugal) ever to receive an Allen Distinguished Investigator award, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group announced. The Paul G.

Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown is one of the first institutions participating in a new programme of the Gulbenkian Foundation, called “Academias Gulbenkian do Conhecimento”. This programme targets children and young people up to 25 years of age, with the goal of creating novel approaches that will equip the participants to successfully navigate our rapidly changing world. The application to the programme has been a competitive one, with 589 project applications from all across Portugal that resulted in the selection of only 34 projects, reflecting a success rate of about 5%.

How can virtual reality be used to study how the brain works? In this episode of Science Snapshots, Eugenia Chiappe, head of the Sensorimotor Integration lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, explains how virtual reality helped her lab discover how the brain integrates visual and motor information in order to navigate the world.

Marta Moita, Deputy Director of the Champalimaud Research Programme and group leader of the Behavioural Neuroscience lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon – Portugal, was awarded a two million euros grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to advance her innovative work on the neural basis of defensive behaviours.

Despite decades of cancer research, the early phases of tumour progression that connect the appearance of few abnormal cells to the formation of a clinically detectable tumour mass remains poorly understood. It was previously proposed that certain mutations could give a competitive advantage to a subset of cells that would enable them to kill and replace their neighbours, thereby initiating a cancerous tumour. Yet, the mechanisms at the basis of such competition were not clear.

For the first time, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, Portugal, have shown that neuronal cell death in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may actually not be a bad thing – on the contrary, it may be the result of a cell quality control mechanism trying to protect the brain from the accumulation of malfunctioning neurons.

For most of his scientific career, Alfonso Renart has been working at the frontier between computational and experimental neuroscience, developing mathematical models that try to explain salient properties of the activity of neurons in cortical circuits and how these embody the computations that underlie cognition.

I feel like I’m still very much searching for a way to describe the essence of what it means to be a living organism in purely physical terms. – Alfonso Renart

Idtracker.ai is a mix of conventional algorithms and artificial intelligence developed at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. From the video footage of a moving crowd composed of dozens of individuals, it learns to identify each and every individual in that crowd. The Collective Behavior lab has now shown that it takes about an hour for idtracker.ai to identify each and every one of 100 zebrafish in a video, at all times, with almost 100% accuracy.

The innate capacity to discern between an appetizing and a foul – i.e. dangerous – odor is essential, from the start, to guide behavior for survival. Until now, little was known about how these innate olfactory responses are hard-wired in the brain. A team of neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown has performed one of the first studies into the central neural circuits that underlie these innate responses.

How do our brains know when and where to place our feet in order to prevent us from tripping each time we find ourselves on a new terrain such as a icy path, or a sandy beach? In an innovative study, the Neural Circuits and Behaviour Lab, finds remarkable similarities between the way humans and mice learn to adapt their manner of walking and pinpoint a site in the brain that controls two components crucial for mastering this task – space and time.