Successful innovation requires more than technological progress alone. Every new concept must first be firmly anchored into an existing context. At least this is the hypothesis of Dutch classicists, working together in the National Research School in Classical Studies OIKOS. They intend to test this…

The SRON space research institute, Leiden University and the TU Delft are appointing six researchers to jointly carry out space research. The research will focus on exoplanets, the evolution of structure in the Universe and technology for developing new pioneering space instruments.

Should the background of the painting remain blue or be restored to its original gold colour? PhD candidate Liselore Tissen will be using 3D prints and eye-tracking software to answer this question. NICAS is giving her a grant of 18,000 euros to accomplish this.

Have you ever experienced the feeling of awkwardness when attending a party where you didn’t know anybody? Ever felt shy at a party within the first few minutes? While this feeling is labelled loosely as feeling socially anxious, social anxiety disorder goes to a much further extent.

They hurtle along at over a thousand kilometres per second: the fastest stars in the Milky Way. PhD candidate Fraser Evans conducted research into these elusive hypervelocity stars and discovered that they have a lot to teach us, about black holes and supernovae, for example.

With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA’s Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our Galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way.

Astronomers led by Pieter van Dokkum have discovered a galaxy that barely contains any dark matter, which actually proves that dark matter does indeed exist. The research results will be published this week in Nature.

Two black holes, in close orbit around each other. Have they slowly drifted together, or did they emerge from two orbiting stars? Together with to colleagues form Amsterdam, Leiden astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart calculated that the second scenario is rather likely.

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? ‘Primordial’ black holes might hold the answer to these long-standing questions. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced just after the Big Bang. Publication in Physical…

Leiden physicists Carlo Beenakker and Bas Hensen receive 35 million euros in a consortium with researchers from QuTech and Delft University of Technology. They will investigate the fundamental limits of quantum physics.

PhD defence

Space telescope Euclid is capable of unravelling the secrets of the universe. That is what the images published by ESA today show, according to astronomers working with the telescope's data. The images exceed all expectations. Scientists within the Euclid consortium, including astronomers Henk Hoekstra…

Over the past year, many of our staff and students have won prizes, been awarded a substantial grant or been appointed to an academic association or a position in public life. All of these are good reasons to include them in our 2019 Hall of Fame. We are proud of them all.

PhD defence

PhD defence

SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research is moving. In 2021, the Utrecht branch will settle in South-Holland. Pieter Dieleman is group leader at SRON. He tells why the upcoming move is such a good idea: ‘SRON is a connecting factor between Delft and Leiden.’

This project on the role of FoxPs in vocal perception and production learning is part of nine PhD-positions funded by the NWO Gravitation Programme which was granted to the Dutch Research Consortium 'Language in Interaction'

For two years, Ineke Sluiter was president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Now, she is returning to the university full time. ‘I always carry themes like accessibility, diversity and inclusion with me.’

There are still things we can learn from the Ancient Greeks. How they managed to make sure that innovations were accepted, for example. A group of classics scholars, led by Leiden, will be carrying out research on this question funded by the largest ever NWO subsidy.

Scientists in Leiden are looking for signals in blood samples to predict whether patients will develop serious COVID-19 symptoms or not. Based on that knowledge, they will be able to propose targeted therapies to prevent serious symptoms. They hope to come up with the first results within the week.

Not only dark matter, but also ordinary matter and dark energy are tracked in the largest ever cosmological computer simulation ever. In the FLAMINGO simulations, you can see virtual galaxies and clusters of galaxies emerging over the course of billions of years. This is no easy task: with more than…

The two instruments of ESA's space telescope Euclid have taken their first test images. The first images indicate that the space telescope will achieve the scientific goals for which it was designed - and possibly much more. Euclid will create a 3D map of a third of the sky, allowing scientists to study…

‘I got into Nature last year, I was nominated for a faculty teaching award and my kids don’t care. But if your simulations get on The Big Bang Theory then that’s something!’ says Huib van Langevelde.

The orbits of 27 stars orbiting closely around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way are very chaotic. As a result, researchers cannot predict with confidence where they will be in about 462 years. ‘That is astonishingly short,’ says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart who collaborated on the r…

Children’s brains react in the same way to social feedback as adults’ brains. But handling frustration or aggression after being rejected is a different matter, developmental psychologist Michelle Achterberg has discovered. Using fMRI techniques, the development of the child brain has now been studied…

Professor Tom Lubensky from the University of Pennsylvania is visiting Leiden University as the 64th Lorentz Professor at the department of Theoretical Physics. He is a pioneer in the field of theoretical soft matter physics and winner of the prestigious Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. We spoke with…

Exclusion elicits the same response in children as in adolescents and adults. That is what psychologist Mara van der Meulen found when she studied brain activity in primary schoolchildren. ‘What is new for us is that it is the same in childhood as later in life.’ Doctoral defence on 10 December.

'Academics who share their knowledge with the outside world on social media are often insulted or even threatened. Especially female academics and academics of colour seem to regularly be the victim of sexist and racist comments.' This is what Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Greek Language and Literature…

To look for atmospheres around planets outside our solar system is to look for extraterrestrial life. Astronomist Sebastian Zieba used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to study small rocky exoplanets but found no aliens yet. However, his findings are still very interesting for future observations.…

You would like to book a hotel room and browse the internet for which rooms and rates are an offer. The rates provided depend on forecasted demand and come about through the use of computer algorithms. However, the rates are often manually adjusted by hotel personnel. What are the consequences and how…

Lecture

The Joan van der Waals colloquium is an ongoing bi-weekly lecture series.

Lecture, Tuesday Talks: Science Insights

Lecture, Oort lecture

Lecture, Tuesday Talks: Science Insights

This is a list of scientific publications by students and staff of the Media Technology MSc programme.

University ceremony