news 2020

'Entanglement' is a ubiquitous concept in modern physics research: it occurs in subjects ranging from quantum gravity to quantum computing. In a publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters last week, UvA-IoP physicist Michael Walter and his collaborator Sepehr Nezami shed new light on the properties of quantum entanglement - in particular when many particles are involved.

Recent accounting scandals, for example the Enron (2001) scandal, Petrobras (2014) scandal and the Wirecard (2019) scandal, emphasize the consequences of untrustworthy financial information. Yet, new data driven audit methods are scarce and not yet widely applied in this industry. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and KPMG, developed a novel data driven method for financial audits.

Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have - possibly without knowing it - been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to atoms moving through light - and that this effect has practical consequences.

Sometimes, the inside of a material can determine what happens on the outside. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has devised a new way to make use of this general truth, in particular in systems that do not conserve energy. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Unfortunately, our society is not yet free of inequality and discrimination. When you develop artificial intelligence in such an environment, you have to be careful that algorithms do not copy this inequality. UvA neuroinformatician Sennay Ghebreab is committed to AI technology that safeguards values such as equality and privacy.

Keeping the streets clean in a dynamic urban environment is one of the major challenges facing Amsterdam City Council. Amsterdam Business School researcher Maarten Sukel developed a system that can recognise rubbish bags and other undesirable objects lying around in the street. The system can spot the object in real time and is based on machine learning.

Wang defended his PhD thesis, which was completed under the supervision of Prof. Marc Salomon, in June of last year. After 4 years in Amsterdam, he moved to China, where he is now assistant professor of Innovation and Information Management at the University of Hong Kong. Marketing, he states, has in some respects progressed further than other disciplines when it comes to the deployment of machine learning (ML).

What is a hit song made up of? And why are some songs much easier to remember than others? Musicologists Ashley Burgoyne and Henkjan Honing investigated this by using music from the Eurovision Song Contest. In the recently launched online experiment Hooked on Music , participants listen to songs from the Eurovision Song Contest throughout the years.

It has been all over the popular news: a Dutch man who has not been able to move or talk for eight years due to severe brain injury can once again function normally with the use of sleeping pills. Neurobiologists Conrado Bosman and Cyriel Pennartz of the UvA's Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences are among the scientists behind a study that tries to unravel the working mechanism of this phenomenon.

The loss of large mammalian frugivores as seed dispersers in tropical ecosystems will have severe consequences for many rainforest plants. This is the conclusion from a study using empirical data and simulations of fruit-eating mammals and palms, both iconic elements of tropical forests worldwide. The authors of the study, including UvA researchers Jun Ying Lim and W. Daniel Kissling, have published their results in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Dark matter might be disappearing and sending its signal - but not very fast - in dwarf satellite galaxies Dark matter is even more elusive than thought before. This is the main message of a new study by a group of scientists that includes Shin'ichiro Ando of the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam.

Today, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) announced the launch of the research project "Designing the tax system for a Cashless, Platform-based and Technology-driven society" (CPT project). The ambitious initiative is led by the Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) of the Amsterdam Law School (FdR).

Contrary to classical economic theories, people do not make economic decisions that benefit them the most but are biased towards default options. This bias has mostly been explained by how the options are framed. An experimental study by behavioural scientists from the University of Amsterdam now proves that biases are also built when framing is absent, originating from a person's internal state.

Women suffered gender-specific violence during the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship, says archaeologist and forensic anthropologist Laura Muñoz-Encinar in a recent publication. The researcher excavated mass graves to find new evidence about the specific forms of repression that women suffered during this period of the Spanish contemporary history.

Gels occur everywhere in our everyday life, but the precise way in which they form is not very well understood. Combining experimental observations and numerical models, physicists from the universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge and from Unilever have now shown that gel formation is closely related to another well-known physical process: percolation.

Researchers from Amsterdam UMC, the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) - partners in the forensic research institution the Co van Ledden Hulsebosch Center - have developed a method that allows for a more accurate determination of the time of death at a crime scene. Existing methods can only give a window of several hours; the new method reduces this to less than an hour.

A team of physicists from the universities of Stanford and Amsterdam, led by UvA-physicist Jorik van de Groep, have constructed a new type of lens, with a thickness of only a single layer of atoms, that can be turned on and off at will. Such tuneable optical elements have promising applications, for example in augmented and virtual reality.

How can we best protect the Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems? Long-term ecosystem restoration strategies should be looking more closely at the complexity of ecosystems, including species interactions and evolution, says an international group of scientists, including UvA soil ecologist Elly Morriën, in the renowned scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters this week, astrophysicists from the University of Amsterdam propose a new way of potentially detecting dark matter. Astrophysicists Thomas Edwards, Marco Chianese and Bradley Kavanagh, from the groups of Samaya Nissanke and Christoph Weniger at the GRAPPA center of excellence, have studied the gravitational waves produced by the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

Small changes in the environmental conditions of biological communities that have only minor immediate effects, may, after a substantial delay, cause dramatic shifts in these communities by triggering evolutionary processes. This is the main conclusion of research from theoretical ecologists Catalina Chaparro-Pedraza and André de Roos at the University of Amsterdam.