news

On 18 September it's International Equal Pay Day-a day to reflect on the global fight for equal pay between men and women. At UvA Economics and Business, this topic is examined from a variety of angles. From fatherhood bonuses and diversity issues in tech startups to the impact of contraception on women's careers-these studies shed light on the hidden dynamics behind the gender gap.

People often feel strongly about politics and this drives their behaviour. For instance, anxiety often motivates people to learn more about a political issue and anger brings us to the voting booth. But we know relatively little about where these emotions come from or how to predict them. Political scientist Isabella Rebasso studied political emotions and found they do not follow the usual pattern of emotions, as we know them in everyday life.

In a collaborative effort involving researchers from the Hot Politics Lab and the SYNC Lab EUR have unveiled intriguing insights into the political attitudes of Dutch adolescents and young adults aged 10 to 25 residing in Rotterdam. The findings shed light on how the youth perceive and engage with politics, offering valuable implications for the future of democracy.

Do you only see news about Britney Spears popping up on a newspaper's website? Then there's probably an algorithm gone haywire.

Is the inside of a plant cell more like a liquid or a solid? While this may sound like an odd question, research carried out at the University of Amsterdam demonstrates it can be either, depending on how much light you shine on it. Chloroplasts within plant cells constitute an active form of matter that undergoes dramatic phase transitions.

Many surfaces get slippery when wet. Some surfaces have the opposite behaviour: they get less slippery. UvA researchers have now shed light on why this is the case. Hydrogen bonds between the surface and the water turn out to play an important role. The research, carried out by PhD candidate Liang Peng in collaboration with five physicists and chemists from UvA, ARCNL and the German Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, was published in Physical Review Letters this week.

Researchers of the University of Amsterdam, together with colleagues at the University of Queensland and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, have developed a strategy for assessing the toxicity of chemicals using machine learning. They present their approach in an article in Environmental Science & Technology for the special issue "Data Science for Advancing Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology".

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam have developed a model that can accurately predict the current migration routes of migratory birds. This offers the possibility of taking adequate measures at the right time when birds are at risk from air traffic or infrastructure. The researchers published their work in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution by the end of October.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world's skies. This is shown in five new articles by an international team of scientists, including Jean-Michel Désert, Hinna Shivkumar and Saugata Barat from the University of Amsterdam are soon to be published in leading science magazines.

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.

Pour coffee into a mug and you might notice that the liquid cascading from the jug resembles droplets linked in a chain. Such oscillating "waterfalls" crop up frequently in our daily lives, but their origin is still not fully understood. In a publication that appeared in Physical Review Fluids this week, UvA-IoP physicist Antoine Deblais and coworkers shed light on these chains of liquid.

Applications in tissue scaffolds for artificial organs, and functional devices The University of Amsterdam has reached a license agreement with the Gouda-based company Atum3D on a method for fast, large-scale 3D-printing with sub-micron resolution.

An international team of biologists, including W. Daniel Kissling of the University of Amsterdam, has used artificial intelligence techniques to estimate the conservation status of nearly 1900 palm species across the world. They found that more than 1000 of the species may be at risk of extinction.

Explainable AI (XAI) is an exciting new field in computer science. PhD-candidate Ana Lucic developed some new algorithms to make the black box of machine learning more transparant. One of them could help healthcare in underserved communities. Lucic will defend her PhD-thesis on Friday 23 September at the UvA.

Researchers Jaap Kaandorp, Rob Belleman of the Informatics Institute, Computational Science lab (CSL) and master student Inge Bieger have developed a new method to use the analysis of 3D images to quantify the morphology of complex-formed and branching corals.

For the first time, scientists from the University of Amsterdam and a Spanish university have developed a method to quickly determine the exposure of people to pesticides via the analysis of wastewater. The researchers published their work in the scientific journal Chemosphere this Summer. The analysis of sewage water and application of wastewater-based epidemiology is already done for drugs such as cocaine and for viruses such as covid-19.

This summer, The NWO Domain Board Science approved 21 grant applications in the Open Competition Domain Science-XL programme (ENW-XL).

Sponges are among the oldest creatures on Earth and play a key role in many underwater ecosystems. A new study by Niklas Kornder of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and colleagues finds that sponges 'sneeze' to clear their water channels. With a sneeze the sponge releases a type of mucus that is eaten by other animals.

Three UvA researchers who all recently obtained their doctorates have received Rubicons grant from NWO/ZonMw to conduct research at foreign research institutions. They are: chemist Eduard Bobylev, astronomer Ines Pastor Marazuela, and socio-cultural researcher Alex Thinius. For many researchers, professional experience abroad is an important step in their career.

Social norms dictate when we can express our emotions and to whom. These norms are much stronger for negative emotions than for positive ones. Does this mean that we can always express positive emotions, and to everyone? No, state psychology researchers from the University of Amsterdam who mapped expression norms for eight positive emotions.