Brazil: What country is this?

The question in the title of this editorial is the name of a song played by “Legi~ao Urbana,” a famous Brazilian rock band from the 1980s and 1990s. Overall, the song has a very strong political message that seems incredibly up to date and relevant almost 30 y after its release. There are many possible answers to the question evoked by this song: Brazil is the country of music, carnival, warm people, socio-cultural diversity, football (soccer), among many others. In addition, Brazil is a country with marked environment, animal and plant biodiversity, including the incredible, unique Amazon biome. In science, it also happens to be the home, for example, of researchers that worked on the genome sequencing of Xylella fastidiosa, the first phytopathogenic bacteria to have its genome sequenced in the world. What about the Temperature Sciences? Well, while this field still has a long way ahead in Brazil, the choice of “Brazilian research in thermoregulation” as the central topic of a special issue of Temperature was certainly not random. Indeed, Brazilian science has exhibited enormous progress over the recent years. In the period between 1998 and 2001, each PhD in the area of Biological Sciences published an average of 1.2 manuscripts in international journals per year, whereas this amount increased by 33% (1.6 manuscripts per PhD per year) in the 2007–2010 period. In particular, Brazilian investigators also have shown increased international participation in the field of Temperature Sciences, as indicated by the results of an advanced search for manuscripts using the word thermoregulation as a topic and having at least one author from a Brazilian institution. By using the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database, the search retrieves 4.1 manuscripts per year in the 1990s, whereas this number is almost 7 times higher in the current decade (27.3 manuscripts per year from 2010 until 2015). Similarly, an increasing number of manuscripts published in the present decade is evident when the terms fever and animal production are searched in association with the term temperature in the same database. This quantitative change in scientific output, observed not only in the thermoregulation field, resulted from significant economic improvements that led to higher investments in research, including an increased number of research groups, graduate programs and fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. Another fact that confirms the ascending insertion of Brazilian scientists in the international community of Temperature Sciences was the organization of the Fourth International Conference on the Physiology and Pharmacology of Temperature Regulation held in B uzios (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in 2012, with 21 local principal investigators, graduate and undergraduate students attending the meeting, and with 30% and 15% of the poster presentations and talks made by Brazilians, respectively. Stimulating scientific collaboration with international research groups has been a strategy adopted by Brazilian funding agencies for a long time and this definitely contributed to the recent achievements made by the Brazilian scientists. This stimulus has grown recently with the Science without Borders Program that sent approximately 100 thousand Brazilian students to several universities abroad. An example of the experience provided by this program resulted in the production of an interesting teaching slide and is described in a chronicle published in the special issue. However, this program came with a high cost that corresponded to approximately U$1.2 billion in 2015 (considering the real-to-dollar conversion on January 1, 2015). In the beginning, it was expected that both public and private organizations would provide financial support to the students, particularly those students from key areas, including science, technology, engineering and math. With the imminent economic crisis, the private companies did not support the program and the financial burden was placed entirely on the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento