Uva_science

Congratulations to Max van der Horst for winning a KHMW award for young talent! KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over these last weeks, we have put each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This last week of the series, we have a winner in the category of Responsible Internet 🛜💻 Max has won the graduation prize for his thesis called: ‘Global Vulnerability Vigilance: Timely Disaster Notification using Internet-Scale Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure’ 🛜🎉

Max explained why he enjoys his studies: “I really like my field of study (Cybersecurity) because you can make a large societal impact on both a small and large scale. I came to solve puzzles and stayed to offer help. It is an amazing community where everyone, regardless of their background, age or position in the labour market, points in the same direction which I find enormously cool!”

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

Congratulations to Jane van der Pal for winning a KHMW award for young talent! 🎉🎈 KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over these last weeks, we have been putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This last but one week, we have a winner in the category of biology. 🍀

Jane told us about their academic interest in the field of biology: “My academic interests lies mainly in molecular and forensic biology, but I enjoy studying everything that’s alive. Especially insects have a special place in my heart.” ❤️🐜🔎

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

Congratulations to Michiel Erkamp for winning a KHMW award for young talent! KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over the next weeks, we will be putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This week, we have a winner in the category of physics. ⚛️

Michiel told us why they are so fond of their field of study: “Physics fascinates me because it unravels the mysteries of the universe, offering a lens to understand everything from the tiniest particles to the vastness of space. Its blend of theory and experimentation continuously pushes boundaries, sparking innovation and shaping our understanding of the fundamental laws governing our world.” ⚛️🗺️🔬

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

Today we are celebrating the official launch of the new bachelor programme Science, Technology & Innovation 🥳 It is the first bachelor’s in Amsterdam at the interface of all scientific disciplines and technology where students can make their own prototypes in the UvA Makerspace.

Lots of big societal and technological challenges require people with a combination of broad scientific knowledge and technical skills to design solutions and make them 👩🏻‍🔬🧑🏽‍🎨

We are very proud that this programme has started since September, this year 👏🏻😇 Find out more via the link in bio🔗

Congratulations to Carmen Berhuis for winning a KHMW award for young talent! KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over the next weeks, we will be putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This week, we have a winner in the category of mathematics 🧮

Carmen told us why she enjoys her field of study so much: “Mathematics is a very broad discipline, in which you learn to think and solve problems in a completely different way. What I enjoy so much about mathematics is that it is very challenging, but when you ultimately truly understand something it provides a good feeling.” 🤔🧮🥳

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

This week was very slippery! 🧊🥶 We hope you were safely able to transport yourself to Science Park. But wait… Why exactly is ice slippery? 🤔⛸️

A group of UvA physicists found out that ice’s slipperiness is due to the mobility of water molecules on the surface of ice. Because of warmth created by friction when sliding over ice, a part of the ice melts and ‘lubricates’ the surface ❄️💦

Furthermore, the researchers sought after the most slippery ice temperature by dragging different skates over a miniature ice rink ⛸️ What might surprise you is that when the temperature was lowered to -100°C, the resistance greatly increased, making ice skating impossible ❌⛸️ The researchers explain that at low temperatures the mobility of those surface water molecules is decreased because there are less vibrations when molecules get colder.

The lowest resistance was found to be at -7°C, which conforms to the optimal temperature that the experience of ice masters has taught them. Therefore, if you would like to skate a world record, this is the temperature to strive for! 📈💪🏼

You can find out more about this research through the link in bio🔗

Congratulations to Mike Nieuweboer for winning a KHMW award for young talent! 🎉🎈KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over the next weeks, we will be putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This week, we have a winner in the category of computer science (informatica). 🧑🏼‍💻

Mike told us why they like their field of study: “Almost all software problems can be viewed as small puzzels and as a computer scientist we have the privilege to solve them. This is not only very fun to do, but also by recognising patterns and combining solutions, our most crazy, original and innovative ideas can be ‘puzzled’ into reality!” 🧩💻

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

Congratulations to Annemarie Vermeulen for winning a KHMW award for young talent! KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over the next weeks, we will be putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This week, we have a winner in the category of Biology. 🌱 Annemarie has won the graduation prize for their thesis called: ‘An Overview of Translational Arrest during Viral Recovery and NLR-mediated Defence in Antiviral Resistance’, which has been published as a review paper in the Genes journal 🥳

We would like to especially express our admiration for Annemarie’s achievement since she has also won a KHMW award during her bachelor’s degree, where now she has a received the award for her graduation thesis of her master’s degree. This makes Annemarie the first-ever UvA biology student to achieve this ❗️🎉

Annemarie told us why she enjoys her field of study so much: “What I like about plant biology, or more specifically phytopathology, is the staggering complexity at a molecular level behind what we observe nature. As plants have evolved their immune system individually from us, studying their immune system and how it is similar to or differs from our own is fascinating to me.” 🌱🔬

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

📸 Photographer: Vera Duinenvoorden

📰 New research has revealed that Rembrandt 👨🏻‍🎨 impregnated the canvas for his famous 1642 militia painting ‘The Night Watch’ with a lead-containing ✏️ substance even before applying the first ground layer. Such lead-based impregnation has never before 🙅🏻 been observed with Rembrandt or his contemporaries.

This surprising observation is yet another result from Operation Night Watc*h*, the largest and most wide-ranging research and conservation project in the history of Rembrandt’s masterpiece 🕵🏻🎨 UvA’s Fréderique Broers is a PhD research scientists microscopy at Rijksmuseum and is part of Operation Night Watch 😎🔬

Fréderique and her team used a combination of X-ray fluorescence and ptychography to identify and visualise sub-microscale chemical compounds in the lower layers of the canvas 🔬🖼️  It was the first time this technique was used on a historical paint sample. Ptychography, a computational imaging technique based on experimentally obtained datasets, is capable of visualising even the lightest elements and organic fractions 🔎

Together with X-ray fluorescence, a lead distribution map of the full Night Watch was obtained. This map reveals the presence of lead throughout the painting and suggests application using large semi-circular brushstrokes, supporting the assumption that it results from an impregnation procedure 🖌️🌀🎨

The researchers think that Rembrandt used this new technique because it is a cheaper, less heavy and more flexible alternative for a painting of such a large size ↔️🖼️ Also, it protects The Night Watch against humid conditions, making it more durable inside the great hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, where it first hung 💧🥽

According to the researchers, the discovery underlines Rembrandt's inventive way of working, in which he did not shy away from using new techniques 👨🏻‍🎨✨

Congratulations to Piyush Bagad for winning a KHMW award for young talent! 🎉🎈KHMW stands for Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen and annually awards prizes to young talent👨🏻‍🎓🧑🏽‍🎓👩🏾‍🎓 for students who got prestigious grades, shown high academic ability or wrote an exceptional thesis.

Over the next weeks, we will be putting each winner of the FNWI in the spotlight ⭐️🔦 🥳 This week, we have a winner in the category of computer science (Informatica). 👨🏽‍💻 Piyush has won the graduation prize for their thesis called: ‘It’s About Time: Time Awareness in Video Foundation Models’.

Piyush told us about their scientific interests: “I am mainly interested in making machines learn about the visual world from watching videos. A particular aspect of videos that I like is time and how things evolve in a video over time going beyond just spatial static understanding. I believe such details in video understanding can have lots of useful future applications in domestic robots, arts, education and more.”🎥💻

Keep up the good work and may you achieve great success in academy 👍🏻✅

Millions of birds lose precious energy due to fireworks on New Year’s Eve 🎆🐦‍⬛🪿📉

Bart Hoekstra from the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) worked together with an international team of researchers to study how fireworks affected bird behaviour 🧨🐦 They used weather radar 📡 and bird count 🪽 data for their research.

The study brought to light (🎇) that 10 times as many birds are flying because of the mass use of fireworks on New Year's Eve up to a distance of 10km from the fireworks compared to another night. An average of 1,000 times as many birds are in the air close to where fireworks are set off as on other nights, with peaks of 10,000 to 100,000 times the normal number of birds 🪽🪶📈

Bart warns us about how this affects bird behaviour: “Larger birds such as geese, ducks and gulls fly to a height of hundreds of metres due to the large-scale discharge of fireworks and remain in the air for up to an hour. There is a risk that they will end up in bad winter weather, or that they will not know where they are flying due to panic and accidents could occur.” 🫨⚠️ Also, last year’s study found that geese spend 10% longer to find their food until 11 days after New Year’s eve 😰🪹

Because 62% of all birds in the Netherlands live within a radius of 2.5 km of inhabited areas, the consequences of fireworks are high for all birds throughout the country. “Flying requires a lot of energy, so ideally birds should be disturbed as little as possible during the cold winter months.”, Bart explains 🥶💤

Therefore, the authors argue for fireworks-free zones in areas where large birds live. Bart suggests an alternative to fireworks: “It would be best for birds if we would move towards light shows without sound, such as drone shows or decorative fireworks without very loud bangs.” 🎆🔇 You can look at live radar data yourself through the link in our bio! 🔗 (Possibly switch internet browser)

We from wish everyone a happy 2024 and a lot of good luck in the new year 🥳🍾🙌🏻