The 'Brains on Board' project is a collaboration between several British universities that partners with the HBP and seeks to ‘translate’ the brains of ants and bees into algorithms that a machine will understand. Its aim is to create equally efficient robots that can be used for rescue, space exploration and terrain analysis.

Water molecules distort the electrical resistance of graphene, but now a team of European researchers has discovered that when this two-dimensional material is integrated with the metal of a circuit, contact resistance is not impaired by humidity. This finding will help to develop new sensors –the interface between circuits and the real world– with a significant cost reduction.

Researchers from IMDEA Nanociencia and other European centres have discovered that the combination of graphene with cobalt offers very relevant properties in the field of magnetism. This breakthrough sets the stage for the development of new logic devices that can store large data amounts quickly and with reduced energy consumption.

The Human Brain Project is a mammoth European initiative with many branches. Italian researchers associated with the project have developed a model of the cerebellum with which to study how that area of the brain works and how it is affected when under illness.

The extraordinary mechanical and electronic properties of graphene endow this material with features suitable for a multitude of potential applications. They can be even more extended by covalent graphene functionalization but graphene presents a challenge: low reactivity. One of the solutions is to manufacture graphene derivatives from fluorographene, which, with new solvents and techniques for eliminating or replacing its fluorine atoms, can produce graphene equipped with new functionalities.

Although there are techniques to analyze what happens in the brain while executing some activity, a new method based on ultrasound solves the problems of the previous ones: it is portable, has a better resolution and can be used in movement. A European team of researchers has validated its effectiveness in active and anesthetized rodents.

The neuroscientist Gustavo Deco jokes: "Basically, we do not know anything about the brain. This Argentine doctor, a triple doctor in Physics, Computing and Psychology, hopes that the joined efforts of all disciplines reveal the secrets of the most complex organ. He is currently researching the circuitous network of connections that are activated when we do something as apparently simple as distinguishing objects with our sight.

A region of the brain that extends through both hemispheres, the planum temporale, is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere. The finding was linked in the 1960s with the hosting of language processing in the left hemisphere, but today European researchers show that this asymmetry is not a marker of language lateralization.

When we sleep, our organism goes through different phases of sleep, however the brain remains interconnected during non-REM sleep, which was thought not to happen. The finding by a European team of researchers has also made it possible to analyse the scientific basis of consciousness, an increasingly important field of neuroscience.