Soil ecologist Emilia Hannula has been awarded a Vidi grant by NWO to examine how soil could become a promising ally in combating climate change and improving biodiversity. ‘Soil creatures might be invisible’, she says, ‘but they play a huge role in creating a healthy environment.’

The Palaeolithic period extends from the earliest stone tools (and in Europe, earliest occupation) to the beginning of the current warm period.

Cláudio de Sá predicted the preferences of people using rankings. He adjusted ‘classical’ machine learning approaches, making them suitable for predicting preferences. His work can be applied in the prediction of election results. PhD defence on 16 December.

Jianfeng Ge and Milan Allen of Leiden University look for majorana quasiparticles using shot noise measurements

Leiden physicists and international colleagues from Geneva and Barcelona have confirmed the mechanism that makes magic-angle graphene superconducting. This is a key step in elucidating high-temperature superconductivity, a decades-old mystery central to physics, which may lead to technological break…

The more complex the object, the harder it is to fold up. Space satellites often need many small motors to fold up an instrument, and people have difficulty simply folding up a roadmap. Physicists from Leiden and Amsterdam have now designed a structure that folds itself up in several steps. Publication…

Martin van Hecke en Anne Meeussen publiceren in het tijdschrift Nature over mechanische metamaterialen. Ze hebben een nieuwe klasse multistabiele materialen ontdekt. Dit is gebaseerd op ribbeltjes plastic.

Koen Bastiaans and his colleagues discovered a new quantum liquid unlike anything ever seen. They did it by using a technique that can be compared to listening to the sound of raindrops falling on a roof. Publication in Science 29 October.

An international group of scientists, led by Leiden physicist Sense Jan van der Molen, has developed the first switchable molecular diode. You can turn this on and off through humidity. Vice versa, it is a humidity sensor at the nanoscale. Publication on 4 December in Nature Nanotechnology.

Sixth-grade students with lower mathematical ability perform better on complex arithmetic problems if they write down their calculations. This discovery was made by psychologist Marije Fagginger Auer, a specialist in Methodology and Statistics. Her outlook is optimistic: ‘After training, these students…

Life returned to something resembling normal after Covid but other crises soon took its place. These great challenges are also being felt at the University and our researchers are working on solutions. The nitrogen crisis, problems with young people’s services and an increasingly urgent climate crisis:…

Besides being the author of such a classic work of literature as The Hobbit, Tolkien was also Professor of English Language and Literature in Oxford. How did he incorporate his research in his fiction? An international conference on the subject is being held in Leiden on 18 June.

Leiden archaeologists have identified a number of bone fragments that were excavated in Germany two years ago. The fragments are from a sabre-toothed cat and appear to be parts of the skull of a prehistoric feline that is over 300,000 years old.

Astronomers at Leiden University have discovered the first planets using a new instrument: the planet hunter MASCARA. This instrument, developed at Leiden Observatory, looks specifically for planet transitions around the brightest stars in the sky, which surprisingly enough have so far have hardly been…

Welcome to the WIIS NL community! We are excited to be launching our newsletter in the week we celebrate International Women's Day.

‘We hope our paper highlights the possibilities and benefits of including artificial intelligence in quantum physics to do new discoveries.’ Vedran Dunjko of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science contributed to a paper that was published in PNAS last year and now received a Cozzarelli Prize…

In the nineteenth century many Dutch people believed in the end of time and the coming of God's thousand-year reign. This belief effectively slowed down the process of modernisation that was taking place in the Netherlands at that time, concludes historian Rie Kielman. PhD defence 13 April.

ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.

Eight major scientific consortia are to receive research investment funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO. Leiden University is involved in all these project and is the lead applicant for four of the awards.

Tom Breukel analysed some 250 stone axes from the Caribbean and reconstructed their biographies. This increases our knowledge of production and trade in the period around the arrival of Columbus. PhD defence on 18 April.

The Leiden archaeologist Wil Roebroeks has been awarded the Spinoza prize for his original observations about early hominins and the development of human society, NWO (Netherlands organisation for Scientific Research) announced on Monday 4 June.

The METIS instrument that’s being built for ESO's future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Northern Chile under the leadership of the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has reached an important milestone: the preliminary design has been approved.

Leiden PhD candidate Jo-Anne Verschoor discovered that nearly twenty percent of the bacterial strains she studied could degrade plastic, though they needed some encouragement to do so. ‘Bacteria are just like people,’ says Verschoor. Her research was published in the journal Communications Biology,…

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of researchers, including Leiden Professor of Molecular Astrophysics Ewine van Dishoeck, has discovered a palette of hydrocarbons in a planet-forming disc around a young, low-mass star. The results confirm that discs around very lightweight…

After many years of preparations, CERN has approved a groundbreaking new experiment: the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP). Physicist Alexey Boyarsky was involved from the start. ‘We know there is physics that’s missing and we aim to find it.’

An international team of researchers led by astronomers from Leiden University (the Netherlands) has produced the first sharp radio maps of the universe at low frequencies. Thanks to a new calibration technique, they bypassed the disturbances of the Earth's ionosphere. They used the new method to study…

Lecture

PhD defence

Chemist Roxanne Kieltyka has received an ERC Starting Grant of 2 million euros. In her lab, she creates gels that mimic the instructive material that supports cells in our body. With the grant, she aims to make these gels stiff and tough, and to create a bio-printed miniature heart ventricle.

Stefan de Jong is Knowledge Broker at Luris. But what does Luris actually do? And what is a Knowledge Broker? This week we take a closer look at Stefan’s work.

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Sleep disorders have a significant influence on our physical and emotional health. Sleep should therefore receive more attention within lifestyle medicine, says Professor Gert Jan Lammers. He will give his inaugural lecture on Friday 20 May entitled: ‘Getting to sleep’.

For the first time, researchers were able to grow organoids from snake venom glands. The lab-grown 3-D structures can produce snake venom molecules. This is a major step in finding treatments to tackle snakebite, which causes over 100,000 deaths each year. Publication in top journal Cell.

Leiden physicists exploit self-assembly of small particles to someday create functional structures such as micro-robots from the bottom up. They have now taken an important step forward by experimentally realizing joints at micrometer scale. Publication in Nanoscale.

How is it that some covid-19 patients are affected much worse than others? Can we predict beforehand which of them will develop critical symptoms Professor Thomas Hankemeier, together with a diverse consortium of universities, academic hospitals and industrial partners, is looking for the answers to…

Alireza Mashaghi and his research team have created a new framework to understand shapes of proteins and DNA. With this framework, many diseases can be understood better.

How dangerous are micro- and nanoplastics? Do they affect the environment? What harm can they do to our bodies? Questions that we can now finally answer because of Fazel Abdolahpur Monikh. Together with his colleagues, he developed a method to detect and quantify nano-sized plastics. Their paper has…

The Faculty of Science has received no less than seven Veni grants this year. Camila Correa, Max van Duijn, Stéphanie van der Pas, Sergii Pud, Mónica Varela Álvarez, Joseph Callingham, and Melissa McClure will receive a maximum of 250,000 euros to further develop their own research ideas over a three-year…

A flu virus could cause a pandemic. And then we would be poorly armed because flu viruses are starting to become resistant to flu medications like Tamiflu. Chemist Merijn Vriends successfully worked on an improved version of such medications. He will be awarded his doctorate on September 12th.

After a promising start, also the second pilot of the digital Brightspace skills platform is a success. Third-year bachelor students had thirty new skill modules at their disposal to support them with their research assignment. Despite the additional challenges posed by COVID-19, students that used…

The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Danstem Institute from the University of Copenhagen and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne have received 300m euros from the Novo Nordisk foundation. The aim of this new international consortium is to bring stem-cell based therapies…

Macrophages – the front line of our immune system – protect us from infections. But in the case of the tuberculosis bacteria, this often goes wrong. The group of Annemarie Meijer from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that macrophages in zebrafish are better able to eliminate tuberculosis…

The Olympic Games will start in Brazil on 5 August. You can find out more about this fascinating but complex country in a series of lectures organised by Studium Generale.

Last January, the education assessors of the different study associations chose Fouzia Lghoul-Oulad Saïd of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) as teacher of the year. Her passion for teaching extends beyond her classes, according to the students who nominated her: ‘ She is always ready…

With the necessary measures, researchers restart their work in various laboratories. The Leiden Cell Observatory is one of the places where scientists resume their lab work.

Specific fatty acid-sugar molecules allow leprosy bacteria, among others, to hide from our immune system. How exactly is not entirely clear. Hessel van Dijk, who received his PhD on 13 October, replicated the molecules, helping to solve a piece of the puzzle. Van Dijk's dissertation is titled: Synthesis…

Pharmacometrist Bas Goulooze has won the prestigious Lewis Sheiner Student Session award. He received the prize of 300 euros at the annual conference of the Population Approach Group Europe (PAGE) in Stockholm, where he presented his research for 800 people.

Cryogenic memories, antibiotic treatment for urinary tract infections and recycling plastic sustainably. These are the subjects of the three NWO-XS grants awarded to Leiden Science researchers.

If it’s up to PhD student Guangsheng Du, patients don’t need to worry about big needles anymore. At the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR), he studied the use of microneedles and nanoparticles as a new vaccination system. ‘I want to create a more patient-friendly delivery method.’ He defends…

Young transgender people are able to decide together with their parents on a reversible intervention with puberty blockers. These are the results of a study by LUMC Curium and Amsterdam UMC of 74 young people undergoing treatment. Ninety percent of the young people studied proved able to make an informed…