790 search results for “natural” in the Student website
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What Darwin couldn’t see: Expedition to uncover invisible life in Galápagos
An international research team is to search for invisible life in the Galápagos Islands. The diversity of bacteria and other microscopic organisms may not be evident to the naked eye, but it is essential to nature. To the islands' giant daisies, for instance: unique endemic plants that are currently…
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With this algorithm, new medicines can be found more quickly
Did he dare take a gamble with his PhD research? Jeroen Methorst didn’t have to think long about it. It could fail or turn out very well. The latter is the case. Methorst developed a computer system that helps researchers find the protein they need. ‘Our whole group is now using this program.’ Methorst…
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New professor of Theoretical Physics: ‘The problems I study can come from anywhere in society’
The financial sector, supply chains and ecology. Not necessarily topics you might associate with physics, yet it’s exactly what new professor Diego Garlaschelli is dealing with. The common thread? Complex networks.
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Caribbean archaeology in times of corona: ‘Instead of fieldwork, our students worked on an online exhibition’
Recently, in the midst of coronavirus situation, Professor Corinne Hofman and her team became part of the NWO project Island(er)s at the Helm. Both the application process as well as the start of the project were challenged by the limitations set by Covid-19. ‘As a preparation we travelled through the…
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Astronomers spot benzene in planet-forming disk around star for first time
An international team of astronomers including Leiden professor Ewine van Dishoeck has observed the benzene molecule (C6H6) in a planet-forming disk around a young star for the first time. The observations tell us more about the forming of planets in this disc, like our own Earth. The scientists publish…
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Dust cloud from two colliding ice planets dims light of parent star
For the first time, an international group of astronomers have seen the heat glow of two ice giant planets colliding. They could also observe the resultant dust cloud move in front of the parent star several years later. Led by Leiden astronomer Matthew Kenworthy, they monitored the star's brightness…
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Biological Origami at molecular level: folding a single protein
Human cells are protecting their proteins from unfolding and aggregating. That's what biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his team discovered after seven years of in-depth research into the folding mechanisms of proteins. With an unprecedented approach, the team was able to study the folding of a single…
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Frustrated scientists convince astronomy journal to implement trans inclusive name change policy
A group of united astronomers have successfully convinced Europe’s leading astronomy journal Astronomy & Astrophysics to institute a name change policy for transgender people and others. ‘It’s really frustrating that such a large organisation needed an initiative from outside to adopt a more inclusive…
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Leiden Classics: Leiden University’s first women students
It was not until 1878 that the first female students enrolled at Leiden University, but the discussion on whether women were suited to study was by no means over. 8 March is International Women's Day. BBC correspondente Kim Ghattas will deliver a lecture on 6 March on the struggle by Arabic women for…
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Aitor Burguet-Coca studied fire-use from Palaeolithic to Bronze Age: ‘This gives us an image on different uses of fire across prehistory’
For the following years, Dr Aitor Burguet-Coca will be a returning face at the Faculty of Archaeology. He will join Dr Amanda Henry’s team with his expertise on prehistoric fire use and the methodologies that studying ancient hearths requires.
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Star birth: a slow and mysterious drama
A star does not just appear in the sky overnight. Its creation takes tens of thousands of years. Twenty years ago, astronomers took a picture of a star in its birth phase. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could now capture that same star in much greater detail. This does not only provide beautiful…
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Rianne Scheerhoorn: 'I am extremely happy that I joined the Central Government Traineeship Programme'
Rianne Scheerhoorn is a government trainee at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. After completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Public Administration, she was sure that the Central Government Traineeship Programme (Rijkstraineesprogramma)…
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Kamaran Palani: ‘Completing my PhD at Leiden University is a dream of me and my deceased father’
Starting your PhD during two major crisis in your country; it happened to Kamaran Palani, PhD student at the Dual PhD Centre and ISGA who lives in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In spite of the difficulties in his county, Palani (34) stuck to his PhD-research about the fluidity…
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Canal Watch scoops communication prize
Canal Watch (De Grachtwacht), which has been cleaning canals since 2018, has received the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Communication Initiative Award.
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New minor Sustainability, Climate Change and Food ‘A full spectrum analysis of global society’
In September 2023 the new minor Sustainability, Climate Change and Food starts. This minor critically examines the complexities of food sustainability through ecological, socio-economic, political, and cultural systems.
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How NeCEN helped develop the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine
The Phase 3 clinical trial results of the promising Covid-19 vaccine of Johnson & Johnson are expected this month. The Dutch electron microscopy facility NeCEN helped develop the company’s vaccine, and they have now published their scientific findings in Nature Communications.
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Why do birds flock? Shedding light on collective motions in heterogeneous populations
Leiden physicists Alexandre Morin and Samadarshi Maity study self-organisation and flocking phenomena. They shed light on flocking, which helps to understand how it is possible that birds in a flock don't collide. With plastic microbeads, they create an experimental setup and they developed a mathematical…
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Ethical guidelines to better regulate DNA research on human remains
Rapid developments in DNA techniques allow researchers to find out more and more about human genetics. An international group of scientists has drawn up five ethical guidelines to ensure that this DNA research is better regulated. Leiden archaeologist Marie Soressi – one of the signatories - explains…
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'Punishment of international cartels by competition authorities needs to be better coordinated'
When an international cartel is exposed, the parties involved often face punishment by more than one authority for the same behaviour. There is very little international coordination in the actions of these authorities. Pieter Huizing claims that this can, and must, change. PhD defence on 10 March 2…
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Master Students MPS Hold up Mirrors in front of Managers during Shadow Week
How do you bring education and practice closer together? In the revised Master MPS (Management of the Public Sector) it is done, for example, through the new profile course Leadership & Behaviour inside and between organisations. The Leiden Leadership Centre (LLC) is involved in organising the course.…
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Ook jij hebt een cyclus – en daar gedraag je je naar
Leiden researchers Arko Ghosh and Enea Ceolini analysed the usage data of hundreds of mobile phones and discovered that our body has rhythms ranging between 7 and 52 days. These cycles influence how we behave. Their research resulted in an article in npj Digital Medicine journal, a Nature Portfolio…
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With this app, students learn to recognise an argumentative error from that aunt over Christmas dinner
In this ‘Educatips’ column, Psychology lecturers share their most important lessons about teaching. This month: Zsuzsika Sjoerds and Sebo Uithol teach students critical thinking with their app 'Family Dinner'. With success: 'The old exams have become too easy.'
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The Chains of Holland’s Glory: research into South Holland's slavery past completed
Karwan Fatah-Black and Lauren Lauret are co-authors of Geketend voor Hollands Glorie (The Chains of Holland’s Glory) that studies the political and economic connections between South Holland and slavery. The findings of this research will be presented with Dr. Joris van den Tol (Radboud University)…
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DNA from a cup of pond water can reveal a lot: Kat Stewart will find out with a Vidi grant from NWO
She has had the idea for seven years, but now environmental scientist and conservation biologist Kat Stewart finally gets to work on it. She has been awarded a Vidi grant by NWO to find out how DNA from water can be used to shed light on invasive species and their impact on native populations.
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Big reduction in CO2 footprint in 2020 due to coronacrisis
The university's CO2 footprint - a visual representation of Leiden University's environmental impact - is calculated every year. The CO2 footprint for 2020 shows a striking break in the trend in terms of energy use, mobility and waste.
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A study on the transmission of extremism within a family context
What happens to children of extremist parents? Commissioned by the Scientific Research and Documentation Center (WODC) of the Ministry of Justice and Security, four ISGA researchers, Layla van Wieringen, Daan Weggemans, Katharina Krüsselmann and Marieke Liem, wrote a report on the nature and extent…
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Claartje Levelt: ' Students sometimes ask questions I have to think hard about'
Claartje Levelt is professor of First Language Acquisition. She researches how babies and toddlers learn their mother tongue. Besides her work, she enjoys being involved with music.
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Seven Leiden professors elected new members of KNAW
Seven Leiden professors have been elected as members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In total 23 new members will be inaugurated on Monday 13 September.
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After the launch of the next big space mission: ‘This is a big step towards understanding dark matter and dark energy.’
Henk Hoekstra and Alessandra Silvestri work on the astronomy and theoretical physics in the Euclid mission. These Dutch researchers are part of the mission.
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Aisha Hassan’s lifelong fascination for developing countries
Aisha Hassan came to the Netherlands when she was two months old. Her mother had fled Somalia and made a new home here. Aisha doesn't remember much about that time, but her mother’s stories about Somalia ignited a lifelong interest in developing countries. ‘Her stories have always fascinated me.’
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App helps students study better
Cramming from a book, making notes or learning summaries. In the past these were about the only ways to memorise your course material. But that has long since changed. Multimedia is the code word. But is it effective?
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A computational tool that will transform bacterial genome analysis
Whether a microbe is beneficial or harmful to a plant can now be predicted with high accuracy thanks to bacLIFE. This bioinformatic tool with an intuitive interface makes it much easier to unlock the secrets of bacterial genomes. A group of Leiden biologists presented it in Nature Communications.
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Scientific breakthrough: evidence that Neanderthals hunted giant elephants
Neanderthals were able to outwit straight-tusked elephants, the largest land mammals of the past few million years. Leiden professor Wil Roebroeks has published an article about this together with his German colleague Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser in the Science Advances journal.
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Travel reveals the mind
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,…
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Leiden biologists find nanoplastics in developing heart
Nanoplastics can accumulate in developing hearts, according to a study by biologist Meiru Wang from Leiden University. Her research on chicken embryos sheds new light on how these tiny plastic particles pose a threat to our health.
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Hydropower, but without devastating consequences for fish and fishermen
Hydropower plants need not be disastrous for fishermen and nature. For that, we need to place new dams more strategically, but also modify or even remove some existing ones. Valerio Barbarossa and Rafael Schmitt showed that with a computer model of the Asian Mekong basin.
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From droplets in the freezer to the inception of a potent new antibiotic
What started as an idea during a social gathering led to an unexpected breakthrough in research on resistant bacteria. Biologists and chemists from Leiden developed a new substance that proves to be effective against bacteria resistant to antibiotics. They published their discovery in Nature Chemist…
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Gerrit Dusseldorp joins Liveable Planet Interdisciplinary Programme: ‘Archaeologists can provide the time-depth perspective’
With the retirement of Wil Roebroeks, Gerrit Dusseldorp will take his place as the archaeological representative in the Liveable Planet Interdisciplinary Programme as an Associate Professor. An expert on the behaviour of early human hunter-gatherers, he will look at the interaction between humans and…
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Lena and Sophie have been selected as Europaeum Fellow: ‘Excited to learn from others’
Four PhD researchers of Leiden University have been selected to participate in the Europaeum Scholars Program 2022-2023. Two of them, Lena Riecke and Sophie Vértiter, are doing their research at ISGA. Time for a introduction.
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‘All of Leiden will join in with the Seeing Stars experiment’
What will happen if the lights in a large part of the city are switched off? How many stars can you see without all that light pollution? This is what researchers, artists and the residents of Leiden are going to investigate during Seeing Stars Leiden on 25 September. ‘Leiden is the ideal place for…
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'Maths is just plain fun'
Gianne Derks is the MI’s new scientific director from 1 May. She has worked abroad longer than in the Netherlands and, after more than 27 years in Surrey, she dreams in English. Who is this new director and who or what managed to entice her to make the move to Leiden?
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Dissertation: existence and development of the European security architecture
On Thursday 15 April, Sabine Mengelberg, associate professor at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy (NLDA), will defend her thesis on changes in European security architecture. Permanent Change? The Paths of Change of the European Security Organizations is the title of…
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From forming embryo to cancer metastasis: the significance of collective cell movement
Luca Giomi has the first results of his ERC consolidator grant. He discovered that epithelial cells move collectively but in different ways, depending on the scale you look at. It is hexatic at small scales, and becomes nematic at larger scales: it is a multiscale order. This collective movement of…
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Professor Pieter ter Keurs: 'People collect to function'
Professor Pieter ter Keurs has spent his entire career studying collecting. Now, he is retiring. ‘I hope the focus on collections will carry on.’
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Surprise: No methane on the night side of exoplanet WASP-43b
The night side of exoplanet WASP-43b, to the surprise of astronomers, does not appear to contain methane. It is likely that extreme winds do not allow enough time for methane to form in detectable amounts. This is the conclusion of an international team of scientists, with Leiden and Amsterdam contributions,…
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Leideners and researchers learn from each other at the Science Market
3 October University has become something of a tradition: a bit of science among the Leidens Ontzet celebrations. During the new and improved edition, the WetenschapsWarenMarkt (Science Market), visitors spoke to researchers about the nitrogen problem, making organs and the city’s connections with A…
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Identifying vulnerabilities and stigmas of children from parents in violent extremist networks
Five questions about PREPARE, the new research project funded by the EU and led by Joana Cook. Cook is Assistant Professor of Terrorism and Political Violence at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and lead investigator on PREPARE.
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Visit the virtual Gold Matters exhibition
The virtual Exhibition Gold Matters is now live and can be explored online. This exhibition is the result of collaborations between artists, members of mining communities, and researchers of the Gold Matters’ project. Curating the exhibition is a collaborative effort of the Gold Matters Team with Sabine…
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MIRD Annual Visit to Geneva and Visits with International Organisations
From 29 – 31 May, second-year students of the Advanced MSc in International Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD) took part in the programme's annual visit to Geneva, Switzerland. Students participated in various institutional visits, and got to hear first-hand from practitioners and experts on a variety of…
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Wat is er te doen op de Leidse Museumnacht?
Op zaterdag 3 juni vindt de Museumnacht Leiden plaats. Ook dit jaar zijn Leidse wetenschappers en studenten onderdeel van de programmering.