Science

UM’s neuroscientists have received three million euros to coordinate an international research project. It’s part of the Human Brain Project, to which the EU awarded one billion euros in 2013. Its goal was and still is to create a computer simulation of the human brain in ten years.  The subproject, in which several European lab...

Geert Hofstede is no longer with us. He died on Wednesday, 12 February, at the age of 91 in Ede, his place of residence. For years, the emeritus professor of Maastricht University was known as ‘the most quoted economist in the Netherlands’. Which is bizarre, because if there was anything that Hofstede wasn’t, it was an economist. ...

Imagine you, a researcher, are given a bag of money, unlimited time and personnel. What research would you do? Economics Professor Thomas Dohmen would like to set up a long-term, large-scale research project to see if there is a causal connection between patient behaviour (in economic terms) and income. And if there were, what would be the best way...

MAASTRICHT. Thirteen PhD students from three Maastricht faculties will need to be recruited this year for research project Limes - Latin for border. The project was recently honoured with a 1.4 million euro European subsidy (Marie Curie Cofund). The participants are the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the School of Business and Economics, the ...

On 14 June 2009, a missile hit the second floor of the house of 39-year-old Palestinian human rights activist Yamen Al Madhoun. Glass and stone splinters slightly injured two of his sisters. Whose missile that was, is still under investigation. Violence and other violations of human rights are an everyday occurrence in the Gaza Strip. That’s ...

MAASTRICHT. The Chinese Yiyun Chen doesn't go outside anymore and has no direct contact with people. She lives in a special bedroom in Eindhoven and does everything from her bed. It sounds like a terminally ill patient, but Chen is an artist. She has chosen this temporary, ascetic life, to find out what it does to a person to spend so long in b...

Employees doing training at work to quit smoking are more likely to stay the course if they are given a reward, showed a study by the Maastricht institute Caphri. The results were published in The Lancet Public Health. Employees who participated in the study, funded by the Dutch Cancer Society, (KWF Kankerbestrijding), could earn a total of...

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When he is at a birthday party and he tells people that he carries out research into thermoregulation - or to be more precise, the regulation of the body's temperature - he is told story after story. About how women always feel colder than men, about older people who constantly have the heating on 25 degrees, in short, about the indoor climate....

Dutch migration laws in the nineteen-eighties included a rule that family members should not be separated for longer than two years. After such a period, the family connection was broken and migrants lost the right to family reunification. “This undoubtedly played a role in the reduction of the number of residence permits in those days,&rdquo...

You take something from me without my consent, so logically I want it back. Whether it is a piece of jewellery, a bicycle, a car or a pen. It is the same with art. Even if it was stolen eighty years ago or maybe even longer and I can prove that the object is mine. In reality, it appears not to be so black-and-white, says Lars van Vliet, Assistant ...

A picture of a fat baby, accompanied by the text ‘When you realize it’s almost summer, and your winter body has gotten out of control’. This is the introduction to one of the latest UM Sports newsletters, urging readers to get “beach body ready”. Nothing wrong with this message. Or is there? “I was disappointed ...

Making sure employees switch off the lights before they leave the office, convincing all youngsters to only have safe sex, and making people choose the healthiest products. Organisations and governments regularly feel that they should change the behaviour of a group. “They often approach this rather optimistically,” says Phil Brüll, app...

MAASTRICHT. Throughout the centuries, atlases have been more than just navigation tools. They can also be works of art, tell a story about how the world was depicted at that time, and hint at the opinions of the cartographer. Jonathan Stockhorst, master’s student of Art, Literature and Society, spent the last few months researching the 9...

“Let me emphasise,” says Vigjilenca Abazi, assistant professor of European law. “Transparency is an important precondition for a good democratic society, for being able to hold people and institutions accountable, for public debates and for the free press to do its work. But that doesn’t mean it’s the sole fixer for ev...

It's 1916. Albert Einstein has just published the general theory of relativity, which describes the curvature of light influenced by mass. “Which means,” says theoretic physicist Gideon Koekoek, “that the light from a star is curved by the sun, and looking from earth is in a different place than you would think.” Even...

At parties, people often ask professor Jean-Jacques Herings for investment advice. One tip that Herings will not give them is: you have to buy cheaply and sell expensively. In theory, this is the best strategy, but in practice it is impossible to execute, he says. “It is an illusion to think that you can predict share prices. It is worthless ...

This weekend, thousands of neo-fascists demonstrated in Rome to “take back the streets from the intruders”. Right hands were raised and slogans like “Italy for Italians; stop immigration, stop illegals, throw out all intruders” were shouted. Still, many people think that the fascist ideology ceased to exist after World War I...

How to decide which treatment, prevention programme or health policy to choose? For many doctors and policymakers the answer seems simple. You look at high-quality scientific studies and take the intervention that has proven to be the most effective. “This has its origins in medicine”, says Tamara Schloemer, researcher at the Department...

Over a thousand deaths to regret and more than two thousand people injured. These were the sad consequences of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013. The day before, cracks were discovered in the walls of the eight-story building. Although the shops and bank at the lower floors were immediately closed, the garment workers in the va...

“I don't want to scare you,” says Hugo ten Cate, professor of Clinical Thrombosis and Haemostasis, every time he gives a lecture on the relation between the contraceptive pill and thrombosis to third-year medical students. “About 70 per cent of our students are female, the majority of whom are on the pill. It is not just ...

“When interest rates have been low for some time, people are likely to think that they can rise at any moment,” says Dennis Bams, professor of Risk Management at the School of Business and Economics. “That is of course not so strange; over the past hundred years, this has happened all the time. It is what all scientists have alway...

Crime suspects can bank on being invited by letter to come in for a chat at the local police station. In serious cases, suspects can even be picked up at any hour of the day or night. Fortunately, suspects are not on their own. Since 1 March 2016, lawyers are allowed to be present in the interrogation room. Or does their presence make no difference...

In 2012, the Dutch providers Ziggo and XS4All blocked The Pirate Bay, the website that epitomizes the download culture. The block lasted two years, but had very little effect: 70 per cent of the downloaders appeared to have found alternative routes to illegally obtain The Lego Movie or Taylor Swift's latest album. The Netherlands is in the t...

Available online at amazon.com: A Baby Einstein playpen with music by Mozart and Bach, a ‘self-discovery mobile’ to hang above the crib, with classical melodies and Baby 2 Be, a CD especially for unborn children, to listen to from the womb. The idea behind this merchandise is that children become smarter if they listen to classical musi...

MAASTRICHT. UM neuroscientist Michelle Moerel, researcher at the Centre for Systems Biology MaCSBio, has been nominated for the Wetenschapstalent 2017 competition. Moerel, who carries out research on the human hearing, is one of the 25 young scientists from the Netherlands and Belgium who were selected by the non-specialist journal New Scientist. ...

Rope-skipping, practising motor skills, ‘reading’ plastic letters with your fingers, or ‘flashing’ letters and words in the left or right visual field. These are all methods of treatment that are regularly offered to children suffering from dyslexia. But they don't help. “The idea behind them is that the left and r...

Self-driving cars, drones used in war zones, robots used to carry out surgical operations. Examples of computers playing a major role, but what happens if something goes wrong? What if a self-driving car doesn't stop at a zebra crossing? Who is responsible? According to Merel Noorman, technology philosopher and postdoc at the Faculty of Arts a...

MAASTRICHT. No science no evidence, no truth, no democracy. That is the idea behind the March for Science, an initiative that has been embraced around the world. On Saturday 22 April, a march will be organised in about 430 cities, including Maastricht. “We want to celebrate science that day. Researchers will come down from their ivory to...

When prof. Harald Schmidt was a student, many lecturers and students raved about the holistic approach in medicine. Schmidt did not want to have anything to do with that “woolly babble”. He felt that if someone had a heart problem, you should look at his or her heart, and not at the person as a whole. In the meantime, he has change...

International organisations such as NATO and the United Nations were founded after the Second World War, just like the predecessor to the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community. Some people feel that they are too powerful and that too much money is spent on them. But is that in fact the case? Yes, international organisations have be...

Patients are not just a little bit tired, but are permanently exhausted. Sleeping doesn't help much - if they can sleep properly at all - and they usually pay a high price for any physical exertion: remaining even more tired than they were, for days on end. According to the present medical state of affairs, patients suffering from the chroni...

You can't expect too much from older employees. Young ones are faster, more creative, and more intelligent. At least, that is the widespread idea. And with an ageing population and a retirement age that is constantly being pushed back, employers are the ones who will be left with the mess. “It is ridiculous to think that older people are...

“An incurable disease? We are inclined to think that it leads to death.” Nothing could be farther from the truth in the case of the lung disease COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), says Annemie Schols, professor of Nutrition and Metabolism in Chronic Diseases and director of research school Nutrim. Many COPD patients - whose l...

“Many people think that sex has to be spontaneous, that it is artificial if you agree on a time in your schedule. Nonsense,” says Marieke Dewitte, psychologist and sexologist at Maastricht University. In her own practice, she sees couples who have been having problems for years and who have doubts about their relationship and sex life. ...

MAASTRICHT. Alexander Sack, professor of Functional Brain Stimulation and Neurocognitive Psychology, has received a Vici grant worth €1.5 million for his research on brain stimulation. Sack focuses on brain-stimulation techniques for treating memory and attention problems after a stroke or depression. Of the 215 academics who submitted a Vi...

THE NETHERLANDS. The Association of Universities (VSNU) and publisher Reed Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle. At the very last minute. Because if no agreement had been reached by 31 December on the renewal of subscriptions and open access – free access to articles written on the basis of research financed by public funding ...

MAASTRICHT. Three students from the Maastricht Science Programme won the NWO Top Sector Chemistry Student Competition last week. Onno Akkermans, Mitch Spronck and Pegah Keshaniyan went home with one thousand euro each. They created a bit with a built-in miniature sensor that detects awake bruxism. In layman’s terms: teeth gnashing during wake...

More often than not, a lab consists of isolated ‘corners’ where research groups work with their own equipment. This kind of fragmentation is a thing of the past in the new lab run by the department of surgery and the M4I institute, respectively by Prof. Steven Olde Damink and Prof. Ron Heeren. Here, on the fifth floor of UNS 50, wh...

MAASTRICHT. Tuesday morning, just before 9 o’clock, the truck from Amsterdam arrives at the grounds of UNS 50. It has a 9.4 Tesla magnet on board, the showpiece in professor Ron Heeren’s lab. The magnet, which cost a million euro, was transported ‘cold’, says Heeren, an expert in molecular imaging. “It is in a kind of...

THE NETHERLANDS. Never before has a Dutch university been among the fifty best universities in the world in an international ranking. The University of Amsterdam managed it in the latest QS ranking. Maastricht is in 118th place. Just like in other worldwide rankings, Dutch universities do well in the new comparison by the research bureau QS. Six a...

MAASTRICHT. The Maastricht Science Programme will award its first bachelor’s diplomas in three weeks’ time. Where will the students end up? To which master’s will they be admitted? “Some of them already know,” says dean Thomas Cleij. “But in September, we will know exactly where everyone has ended up. That will b...

MAASTRICHT. Students of today will live to be a 100 years, on average. What does one do with all that time? Rudi Westendorp, professor in geriatrics medicine at Leiden University and director of the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, advises them to start thinking about it now. “Don’t assume that you will retire and buy a boat when ...

MAASTRICHT. Safeguarding existing catalogues of human rights and fundamental freedoms, that is what article 53 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is about. In short: member states may always provide their inhabitants with more protection in their own constitution than in the EU Charter, but never less. But does the fact that...

MAASTRICHT. Small numbers belong on the left, large numbers on the right. Most Western people, who are used to writing from left to right, will instinctively agree with this. This is referred to as the natural number line, the way in which you arrange numbers in your head. Does one’s attention automatically go to the left when one thinks of a...

MAASTRICHT. Informal (also known as under-the-table) payments in Central and Eastern Europe are higher and more frequent for maternity care than for any other type of medical care. This is one of the conclusions of a broader research project on out-of-pocket payments (both formal and informal) across Europe. Wim Groot, Tetiana Stepurko, Jelena...

MAASTRICHT. Imagine that you have been voting for the Liberals for years. This time, however, you fear that – if they become the largest party in the elections – they will form a coalition with a party you don’t like. To prevent this you vote for the Democrats, even though you agree more with the Liberals’ programme. Voting ...

MAASTRICHT. How to describe someone you only know from a photograph? Friendly? Authoritarian? Reliable? Competent? That was the key question in the Marble research by Roderick Bronzwaer, who completed his bachelor’s in Psychology in July. For the tests, he went to Hong Kong, where he showed test subjects photographs of politicians from the Ne...

MAASTRICHT. Imagine: you are completely conscious, you understand everything that is going on around you, but you cannot move or communicate. This is what patients suffering from locked-in syndrome experience. Would it not be great if a small device that measures brain activity enabled you to ‘speak’ to the people around you? It is sti...

MAASTRICHT. Two thirds of the Dutch people support the cultivation of meat, according to a survey carried out by Flycatcher research agency among 1,200 Dutch respondents. The reason for the study was the presentation of a hamburger cultivated by Mark Post, UM professor of vascular physiology, on 5 August in London. Half of the respondents would li...

MAASTRICHT. Four Maastricht researchers are going to study the ‘phenomenon’ of André Rieu. They want to find out what the secret is behind this Maastricht violinist and orchestra conductor. Why does his music appeal to such a broad public? How does he manage to remove the divide between classical and popular music? And why does music fr...

Last Friday, the staff of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience moved from Universiteitssingel 40 to Oxfordlaan 55, just a few metres away. Boxes, plants and other office gear were all brought to the new Psychology building, where the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre houses a high and an ultra-high field MRI scanner of 3 and 7 Tesla. In a few mon...

Work hard now, to be able to work harder in your later life! This was the advice of the Nobel Prize winner Harald zur Hausen (1936) to medical students yesterday at the Maastricht School of Management. The German virologist gave insight into the do’s and don’ts of a successful academic career, building a network and landing grants. Zur ...