news 2021

Nine promising young UvA researchers have received Veni grants from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Getting old is usually seen as unappealing, but ageing in fact has some positive effects. One of the advantages of getting old is feeling better. Older people generally experience more positive and less negative emotions than younger people. In a new study published in Psychological Science, Rui Sun and Disa Sauter from the University of Amsterdam tested whether this advantage of older people would also hold during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The quantum world and our everyday world are very different places. In a publication that appeared as the "Editor's Suggestion" in Physical Review A this week, UvA physicists Jasper van Wezel and Lotte Mertens and their colleagues investigate how the act of measuring a quantum particle transforms it into an everyday object.

What does it mean when we say that something is extremely cold? A physicist's answer would be: this means that atoms and molecules barely move. For several decades now, physicists have been developing techniques to create such ultracold states of matter, using lasers to bring gases into the regime where quantum mechanics reigns.

How a new neural network can predict and understand molecules in a more efficient way A research paper from Victor Garcia Satorras, Emiel Hoogeboom and Max Welling, from the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, recently got accepted to the ICML congress, the leading conference on machine learning.

The laws of quantum mechanics allow for the existence of 'quasi-particles': excitations in materials that behave exactly like ordinary particles. A major advantage of quasi-particles over ordinary particles is that their properties can be engineered. In a Nature Materials News & Views article this week, IoP physicist Erik van Heumen describes recent experiments where even the interactions between quasi-particles can be tuned.

What does a quantum theory of gravity have in common with electrons in a 'strange' metal? At first sight: not much, but this week in Nature a Dutch NWO consortium, including researchers Jake Ayres, Maarten Berben and Nigel Hussey (Radboud University), Jan Zaanen (Leiden University) and Erik van Heumen (University of Amsterdam) reports on new experimental findings that may point towards such a link after all.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants worth €800,000 each to 13 experienced researchers from the UvA and the Amsterdam UMC, location AMC. The grants will enable them to develop their own innovative lines of research and set up research groups over the next five years. The Vidi grants are aimed at experienced researchers who have already conducted successful research for a number of years after their PhD.

Work & Organizational Psychologist Jessie Koen discusses her research into the impact of AI on work AI can make people think differently about their work, causing them to question how skilled they still are and feel uncertain about the future of their job. Will your job soon be taken over by a robot? Such uncertainty can lead to unhealthy stress.

A scientific consortium has found that ancient El Niño-like weather patterns were the primary drivers of environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 620 thousand years - the critical timeframe for the evolution of our species. The group, including Dr William Gosling from the University of Amsterdam, found that these ancient weather patterns had more profound impacts in sub-Saharan Africa than glacial-interglacial cycles more commonly linked to human evolution.

A new study shows that differences between juvenile and adult individuals are crucial for the stability of complex ecological communities. These findings, now published in the scientific journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences by Prof. André de Roos from the University of Amsterdam, provides important information about the dynamics and functioning of diverse ecological communities.

When a drinking glass falls on the floor and breaks, the shards will vary in size from large to extremely small. For the broken glass of a bus shelter, the story is different: all fragments have roughly the same size. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam, Unilever Vlaardingen and EPFL Lausanne investigated the breaking phenomenon, and discovered that two very different processes cause the two types of shards.

To solve practical issues, sometimes all we have to do is study nature. An often quoted example is that of the gecko, a small animal known for the phenomenal adhesive strength in its feet, which allows it to walk on walls and even ceilings. The phenomenon led to 'gecko tape', a strongly adhesive DIY-tape.

Exploring the minds of our primate cousins in the wild, using under-exploited observations of their travel paths A large set of observations of the travel paths of wild primates provides new opportunities for in-depth insights in the evolution of the mental abilities that primates, including ourselves, use to know where and when to travel in the most efficient way.

Water can freeze from liquid to solid ice or boil into a gas. In the kitchen these so-called phase transitions aren't smooth, but at high pressure their discontinuous nature is smoothed out. An international team of physicists, including UvA-IoP physicists Philippe Corboz and Schelto Crone, has now discovered the same behaviour in certain quantum magnets.

Researchers of the University of Amsterdam have installed a BirdScan radar at the elephant enclosure in ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo to record bird migration. This BirdScan radar is part of the first site of the national research project ARISE that has the ultimate aim to monitor biodiversity in the Netherlands.

Theoretical physicists have taken a new step in understanding the so-called neutrinoless double-beta decay. This decay in atomic nuclei has never been seen before, but an observation would be an important signal that the standard particle theory is not satisfactory. Theoretician Jordy de Vries of the University of Amsterdam and Nikhef is publishing with colleagues a follow-up to a paper that caused a stir in 2018.

The rise of populism has been accompanied by explanations as to why people feel drawn to it. An international study across 15 European countries, carried out by researchers at the University of Amsterdam and funded by the European Union's H2020, now sheds light on the role of negative emotions. The conclusion is that 'anger, contempt and anxiety are much better predictors of populist attitudes than socio-economic and socio-cultural factors.' Populism has been on the rise in Europe for some time.

A fabric's physical properties, such as its wettability and porosity, affect the dynamics of an impacting droplet. Understanding these effects can help forensic scientists draw a better picture of a crime scene. In a paper that appeared in Physics of Fluids, UvA-physicist Thijs de Goede and collaborators from UvA, ETH Zürich, Empa (Switzerland) and the University of Sherbrooke (Canada) develop a physics-based approach to blood droplet analysis.

Marine biologists have been able to visualize for the first time how tropical sponges and their symbiotic bacteria work together to consume and recycle organic food. The research led by Meggie Hudspith and Jasper de Goeij from the University of Amsterdam, was a collaborative project with colleagues from the Australian Universities of Sydney, Queensland and Western Australia, and the research institute Carmabi on Curaçao, and is now published in the scientific journal Microbiome.