news 2022

TU Delft Resilience professor Tina Comes played a central role in advising the EU on how to improve its role in transboundary crises. Today she handed over the synthesis of the scientific evidence on crisis management to two European Commissioners and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Comes chaired the working group that collected the latest scientific evidence and evidence-based policy options to help the EU rethink its approach to risk and crisis management.

The affordability of cigarettes in the Netherlands remained virtually unchanged between 2010 and 2020. Throughout this period, 100 packets of cigarettes cost smokers between 2.5 percent and 2.6 percent of their annual income. This has emerged from research by Maastricht University (UM), and makes it clear that the excise duty increases have been insufficient to make smoking less affordable.

Increasing numbers of young people reportedly make regular use of low doses of LSD or other illegal substances to improve their cognition. Disquiet among parents and educational institutions is growing. Nadia Hutten investigated this phenomenon during her PhD, supervised by Professor Jan Ramaekers. How dangerous is this type of 'microdosing'- And does it actually enhance students' performance? No, Hutten has never used drugs to improve her own mood or cognition.

A breakthrough at the University of Twente is bringing new brain-like computers one step closer. An international group of researchers led by Professor Christian Nijhuis has developed a new type of molecular switch that can learn from previous behaviour.

Increasing melt threatens to saturate the firn layer that covers the Greenland ice sheet. Saturation of this layer will dramatically increase global sea level rise, adding about 9 mm a year from the Greenland ice sheet alone (the current sea level rise from all sources is about 4 mm per year). A new study by researchers from Utrecht University, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, and University of Colorado Boulder now shows that this threshold could be reached as early as the first half of the 22 century.

Researchers of Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and VSL have developed an alternative positioning system that is more robust and accurate than GPS, especially in urban settings. The working prototype that demonstrated this new mobile network infrastructure achieved an accuracy of 10 centimeter.

The test centre for drone and sensor applications Unmanned Valley will get access to a drone-corridor to sea, right over the dunes near Katwijk. This new flight path goes from former air force base Valkenburg (South-Holland) to the North Sea and has just opened. Bart Remes, project manager and researcher at The Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory (MAVlab), which is part of the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the TU Delft, is very pleased with the new test facility.

In 2021 off all peer reviewed scientific articles at the UvA, 79 percent was published in open access or made freely available through the repository. This is a growth of almost 8 percentage point compared to 2020. Each year in October the Dutch universities are reporting , via the Universiteiten Nederland , the percentage open access peer reviewed articles for the year before to the minister of OCW.

The METATOOL project received 4 million euros from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and the 'Awareness Inside' Pathfinder Challenge to investigate how robots can invent new tools as ancient humans did.

Huge amounts of data are available in our society: for instance weather information, financial data, sports statistics, which are not yet represented in language. All this kind of data could improve our lives, increasing our understanding of the world and helping us take actions. But in a lot of cases, available raw data is too much and too unclear to understand.

14:35 Publication This special issue of the 'Journal of Perpetrator Research' focusses on the way perpetrators are portrayed in comics and graphic novels and how this is changing.

13:27 Publication The paper 'Mismatch Cycles' by Assistant Professor Ana Figueiredo and co-authors Isaac Baley and Robert Ulbricht, has been published in the November issue of the Journal of Political Economy, one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in economics. A novel narrative for the scarring effect of unemployment In their paper, Ana Figueiredo (Erasmus School of Economics) and co-authors Isaac Baley (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Robert Ulbricht (Boston College) study the cyclical dynamics of skill mismatch and quantify its impact on labour productivity.

By presenting his research findings at a major international meeting, Joeri Zwerts experienced how he makes societal impact as a scientist. Last month, Zwerts spoke at the general assembly of global forest certification organization the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). At this meeting, he presented his research about the effect of FSC conservation measures on wild mammal populations in Gabon and Congo.

The health and welfare of animals that produce our food is of great importance. Researchers from the University of Utrecht and the Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Nutrition (ILVO) in Flanders, among others, received almost eight million euros from the European Union to develop in cooperation with the industry innovative measuring equipment to monitor the welfare of broiler chickens and fattening pigs as they are loaded, unloaded, transported and slaughtered.

Researchers from the University of Twente, in collaboration with Shell, developed a new mechanism that makes the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which is an essential feedstock in the production of chemicals. Within this project under the umbrella of the Advanced Research Center Chemical Building Blocks Consortium (ARC CBBC), the researchers published their findings in the scientific journal ACS Energy Letters.

Four TURBO grants were awarded today to researchers of the University of Twente ( TechMed Centre ) and RadboudUMC for innovative research into medical technology. The grants will enable the researchers to jointly develop their innovative idea and pursue follow-up funding. Treating blood clot formation with microbots Project title: Navigable Active Treatment of Acute Limb Ischemia - NATALI Islam Khalil (UT) en Michiel Warlé (Radboudumc) Peripheral artery disease can cause blood clot formation in the bloodstream, which can lead to ischaemia, (lower) leg amputation, or sometimes even death.

Bregje de Wildt explored different ways to grow -mini-bones- in the lab that could be used to test newly developed medicines for bone diseases. Human bones can recover from small fractures, but if the fractures are too large or the regrowth process is unbalanced, as is the case with osteoporosis, treatment is required.

People with early-onset dementia were having symptoms in the five years before diagnosis that could potentially point to their developing dementia. This is one of the important conclusions of epidemiologist Stevie Hendriks, who spent four years researching early-onset dementia and is defending her dissertation on Nov.

Since last week, a large-scale demo installation in Lampedusa is producing drinking water, salts and chemicals from seawater in an environmentally friendly way. Project leader Dimitris Xevgenos: "This is the first time that we're producing these marketable products at pre-commercial scale in Europe together with the right actors, including the use of waste heat.

Bacteria living on the walls of a cave in Romania use methane as their only source of food. Researchers from Utrecht University and national and international colleagues describe the previously unknown microbes in a paper in Nature Microbiology . Knowledge about the new species might contribute to the development of new techniques that reduce the concentration of methane in the atmosphere.