news

Sugars come in all shapes and sizes. We need them for energy and we enjoy them, but complex variants may also be used as medicine. Chemist Peter Moons from Radboud University developed these types of sugars. He will defend his thesis on 16 May. When you think of sugars, you think of sugar cubes or carbohydrates, but sugars are more than just the sweet tasty stuff.

The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three scientists at Radboud University on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 10^78 years (a 1 with 78 zeros) to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 10^1100 years (a 1 with 1100 zeros).

Alessandro Ingrosso, researcher at the Donders Institute for Neuroscience, has developed a new mathematical method in collaboration with colleagues in two Italian research institutions, which enables the prediction of the effectiveness of transfer learning in neural networks. T he problem of limited data AI systems are typically trained with large amounts of data.

Scientists have been divided for centuries by the question of what consciousness is. The two major theories have now been put to the test by a group of researchers, including neuroscientists Floris de Lange and Yamil Vidal from the Donders Institute at Radboud University, and have been found to be partly incorrect.

A small international team of astronomers including Silvia Toonen (UvA) and Gijs Nelemans (Radboud University) has discovered two white dwarf stars orbiting each other that will merge and explode into a type Ia supernova. This missing link of astronomy has long been predicted and has finally been found.

Researchers at Radboud University have developed a new method to calculate the reliability of the power grid. This new method, based on Graph Neural Networks, is not only a thousand times faster but also more accurate than current methods. The results of the new method have been published in the journal Applied Energy.

The gas sucked in by the iconic supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 appears to be moving against the black hole's direction of rotation. This is shown by new computer simulations from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which includes researchers from Radboud University. Using observations from 2017 and 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has deepened our understanding of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87*).

The energy network in the Netherlands is overcrowded and the demand for new connections cannot be kept up with. So if there is still space to be found, a network company like Alliander wants to know exactly where and when that space is available. Data scientists from Alliander and Radboud University worked together on a system to better map this out.

The field cricket - the Dutch insect of the year 2024 - has been going downhill in recent years. Research by Joost Vogels of Radboud University, the Bargerveen Foundation and research centre B-WARE shows that this is mainly due to an excess of nitrogen.

To get a good sense of a country's level of development, you need to look at the items people have in their homes, according to economists Rutger Schilpzand and Jeroen Smits from Radboud University. Research on lowand middle-income countries often focuses on income, health or education, but that doesn't tell you the full story of a country's situation.

Several experimental measures taken at Frisian farms to restore biodiversity in former peatlands, are unsuccessful. Three different ways in which the water levels were raised, did not have the desired effect. This is according to research by ecologist Tom Heuts of Radboud University. 77% of Dutch wetlands (bogs, marshes) have been drained, mainly for agriculture and cattle breeding.

Astronomers have used data from the European Gaia Space Telescope to discover 55 high-speed stars launched from the young star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This increases tenfold the number of known "runaway stars" in this region. The team of astronomers from the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and Radboud University (Netherlands), among others, is publishing the results this week in Nature.

Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.

A new study led by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and with contributions from Radboud University's Marijke Haverkorn, has unveiled significant insights into the Milky Way: a magnetised galactic halo. This discovery challenges previous models of our galaxy's structure and evolution.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations in the United States reduced racial prejudice among white Americans, at least temporarily. This is according to research by social psychologist Max Primbs. 'Racial bias declined rapidly, but also gradually increased again as BLM protests received less attention.' The murder of George Floyd in 2020 revived the Black Lives Matter movement, a large scale social movement that aims to highlight and reduce structural racism and inequality in the United States.

Problematic substance use occurs relatively frequently in people with a mild intellectual disability. But the mainstream addiction care is not always effective for this group. During her PhD, psychologist Lotte Gosens and colleagues working in intellectual disability care and addiction care developed a treatment that does work.

In today's fast-paced business environment, organisational change is inevitable, yet around 60% of these changes fail. Leaders can play a crucial role in navigating these transitions, but achieving success calls for more than just traditional leadership styles - it's also about mastering certain political skills.

The Dutch Black Hole Consortium has launched an 8-language version of the BlackHoleFinder app that citizens all'over the world can use to help identify newly formed black holes. Previously, the app was only available in Dutch and English. Now Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian have been added, greatly increasing the number of people who can access the citizen science app in their native language.

Mental effort is always unpleasant. This is the conclusion of an extensive study by Radboud researchers among participants from different countries and professional groups. Even when people volunteer to do brainwork, they experience the mental burden as unpleasant. "We mainly do Sudoku puzzles because of the reward, not because we really enjoy the mental effort." "We already know that in principle, people do not enjoy physical labour", explains psychologist Erik Bijleveld.