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 an icy path, or a sandy beach?

In an innovative study, scientists from the Neural Circuits and Behaviour lab (careylab.org), find 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.

When rectal cancer infiltrates adjacent lymph nodes, patients may have a better clinical outcome if chemotherapy or radiotherapy are administered prior to the standard surgery to remove the tumour. However, the status of these lymph nodes can only be precisely assessed upon removal during surgery.

A multidisciplinary team of scientists and clinicians at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, developed a new noninvasive MRI methodology, called SPI (Susceptibility Perturbation MRI), that is able to identify whether lymph nodes have been infiltrated by malignant cells with high accuracy in rectal cancer patients.

Such a characterisation can help define treatment strategy for rectal cancer patients and may have future implications for other malignancies.

optoPAD is a newly developed system for creating virtual taste realities. It combines advanced optical and genetic techniques with touch-screen technology to monitor and control feeding behaviors and taste sensations in fruit flies. This new tool, which is now being freely shared with the scientific community, significantly extends the toolset available to study feeding behavior in this model organism, which in turn may provide important insight into the neural circuitry that underlies food choice.

Suppressing the capacity of tumours to destroy the healthy tissue that surrounds them is essential for fighting cancer-induced morbidity and mortality. Now, a new study by the Cell Fitness lab in human-derived tumours reveals a potential way of doing just that. The study reveals a competition mechanism used by human cancer cells for killing their neighbours and demonstrates that combining substances that block this mechanism with chemotherapy results in more effective tumour elimination.

Weber’s law is the most firmly established rule of psychophysics — the science that relates the strength of physical stimuli to the sensations of the mind. Despite being almost 200 years old, no clear way has been found to select among its many proposed explanations. Now, the Circuit Dynamics & Computation lab has discovered a new psychophysical rule that allowed them to identify a unique and robust explanation of Weber’s law.

For an artificial vision machine to recognize human faces, for instance, it is typically necessary to previously train it by showing it thousands of images of human faces. However, not only is this process very time-consuming; it is also like a shot in the dark, because there is no control over what the machine learns during its training. Which facial features has it picked up to be able to do its job? No one really knows. The process works, but the machine itself behaves like black box.

It is well known that individuals who work night-shifts, or travel often across different time zones, have a higher tendency to become overweight and suffer from gut inflammation. The underlying cause for this robust phenomenon has been the subject of many studies that tried to relate physiological processes with the activity of the brain’s circadian clock, which is generated in response to the daylight cycle.

Lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, is a biological stressor that occurs under various conditions such as wound healing and stroke. To rescue the tissue, the body has innate mechanisms that “kick in” to make the cells of the hypoxic tissue more resistant and assist in tissue repair. One such mechanism is the expression of a protein called Hypoxia Induction Factor (HIF), which controls several processes such as glucose uptake, growth of blood vessels and cell proliferation.

For decades, scientists seeking to explain the emergence of complex group behaviours, such as schooling in fish, have been divided into two camps. The Collective Behaviour lab has found a way out of this dichotomy with a novel AI model that bridges across the two.

Image credit: Gil Costa

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