22 December 2014
With the help of an NWO KIEM grant of €15,000, 27 consortia of researchers and public and private partners will jointly explore possibilities for innovations for the creative industry. In addition, 8 large strategic research projects and 4 projects for embedded research within the creative industry have been made possible with funding from the NWO scheme for strategic and embedded research.
In April 2014, the first five projects within the first call for proposals of the Food & Business Global Challenges Programme were awarded. In December 2015, most of the projects had taken off and joined the kick-off meeting at the NWO office in The Hague. Organising the kick-off meeting was a joint effort of NWO-WOTRO and the Food & Business Knowledge Platform (F&BKP).
17 December 2014
The Netherlands eScience Center is pleased to announce the initiation of six new projects in the areas of Environment and Sustainability, Life Sciences & eHealth, Humanities and Social Sciences and Physical World and Beyond. The projects, scheduled to start in 2015, are collaborations with research teams from multiple Dutch academic groups and represent the latest step in the continued development of NLeSC’s project portfolio. NLeSC is a joint initiative of the Dutch national research council (NWO) and the Dutch organization for ICT in higher education and research (SURF).
16 December 2014
Cards, such as identification cards and credit cards, which are impossible to hack. With a system based on quantum physics this will soon be possible. Researchers from the UT research institute MESA+ and the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have together developed a method with which you can authenticate physical objects which are impossible to copy. The research has been published today in The Optical Society’s (OSA) new high-impact journal Optica (and is shown on the cover). This research has been made possible by funding from the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), the STW Technology Foundation, the European Union and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Blood pressure, blood coagulation, blood sugar level, heart rate, breathing rate, galvanic skin reaction or everything at once… there is scarcely a bodily function that we cannot continuously monitor ourselves at home or wherever we might be with a small device. And if we enter the measurement data into our app, our e-coach tells us what to do: which medicine we must take, that it is time to do some exercises, or even that we should register for the group fitness session that has been organised in our neighbourhood.
Unhealthy food causes obesity, diabetes and heart problems and costs society money. But who is responsible? Consumers who overeat or use too much fat, salt and sugar? Or producers who make all of that unhealthy food and market it? The two parties seem to have a stranglehold on each other.
15 December 2014
The European Joint Programming Initiative on Climate: “Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe” (JPI Climate ) has awarded funding for approx. EUR 10 million to support transnational collaborative research projects on the two following themes:
An international consortium including Prof. Albert Heck from Utrecht University has uncovered the molecular events underlying the biological processes of the creation of stem cells from specialized (e.g. skin) cells, a process called cellular reprogramming. The team also discovered a new type of stem cells termed F-class that have unique properties compared to the previously known stem cell types. This opens up new avenues for generating useful “designer” cells, which might not necessarily exist in the body or during development but could be safer and more efficient when used for drug evaluation in personalized therapy. This research was co-financed through the partly NWO-funded Roadmap programme Proteins@Work.
10 December 2014
The attitude governments adopt towards Iran strongly depends on the number of prisoners in their own country and whether the government trades in oil with Iran. The more prisoners a country has, the more aggressive the attitude of its government towards Iran. However if a government trades oil with Iran then it adopts a milder attitude towards the country than those nations without such an oil connection . These are the findings of research by NWO-funded scientists Wolfgang Wagner and Michal Onderco from the VU University Amsterdam. They published their research results this week in the journal International Studies Quarterly.
8 December 2014
Recent scientific research has revealed that the blue irises in Van Gogh's Field with Irises near Arles were once purple. That is because the red is slowly disappearing from Van Gogh's paintings. The discolouration has arisen because the red pigment that Van Gogh used in his paint is strongly deteriorating, conclude the scientists who have investigated Van Gogh's work. They talked about their findings in the Dutch TV programme De Kennis van Nu [The Knowledge of Now] that was broadcast on Sunday 7 December. The research is a joint project between scientists from Tilburg University, the Van Gogh Museum and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. NWO is funding the research through the Science4Arts programme.
