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Extreme shyness likely emerges in very early childhood. Developmental psychologist Milica Nikolic is conducting research to determine how parents can prevent their children from becoming overly shy in later life. Extreme shyness can have a negative impact on both mental and physical health. Almost everyone has experienced it at one time or another: all eyes are on us - for example during a presentation at work - and we suddenly feel shy.

Covid-19 lockdown measures introduced substantial psychosocial stressors in everyday life. Did changes in mental wellbeing lead to more cannabis use and more severe cannabis disorders? A study among near daily cannabis users concludes that while cannabis use increased at the group level, the effect of the first lockdown months on the addiction severity varied significantly between individuals.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Konstanz and Amsterdam have uncovered a new state of matter, liquid glass, with previously unknown structural elements. The discovery leads to new insights into the nature of glass and its transitions. While glass is a truly ubiquitous material that we use on a daily basis, it also represents a major scientific conundrum.

Excavation work in the courtyard at the construction site for the new University Library has been completed. During the dig, the municipality of Amsterdam's Knowledge Centre for Monuments and Archaeology (MenA) conducted extensive archaeological research and skeletal human remains were found. Physical anthropology, a sub-discipline of Archaeology, is the study of the human skeleton in an archaeological context.

There is a war for talent raging within the field of AI, with young researchers being lured away by big tech companies. Yet there are also talents who consciously choose an academic career. Two professors and two rising stars talk about their work. Leading by example Cees Snoek is Professor of Intelligent Sensory Information Systems and Pascal Mettes is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Science.

'Entanglement' is a ubiquitous concept in modern physics research: it occurs in subjects ranging from quantum gravity to quantum computing. In a publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters last week, UvA-IoP physicist Michael Walter and his collaborator Sepehr Nezami shed new light on the properties of quantum entanglement - in particular when many particles are involved.

Feel like a good laugh? Then why not take part in a listening experiment designed by UvA psychologists. Listen to someone else laughing out loud and rate how contagious you find their laughter. You can also add your own laughter fragment and thereby help the researchers find out what contagious laughter sounds like.

The application of network theory in financial audits Recent accounting scandals, for example the Enron (2001) scandal, Petrobras (2014) scandal and the Wirecard (2019) scandal, emphasize the consequences of untrustworthy financial information. Yet, new data driven audit methods are scarce and not yet widely applied in this industry.

At the beginning of March 2021, there is a big fuss among the more fanatical wing of CDA supporters. What is going on? Just before the Dutch Parliamentary elections, charismatic party leader Hugo de Jonge committed a slip of the tongue that even Joe Biden would not have made. 'As Jesus would say, don't pin me down on it,' he said in a respected talk show.

Stress increases the risk of physical and emotional problems, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, anxiety disorders, depression and burnout. Millions of people are on anxiety-reducing medication to diminish stress, but they can have nasty side-effects or even be addictive. Fortunately, there are alternatives, such as music therapy.

Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have - possibly without knowing it - been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to atoms moving through light - and that this effect has practical consequences.

The summer of 2019 saw the kick-off of the largest and most multifaceted research project ever to focus on Rembrandt's famous painting The Night Watch. Ever since the museum reopened after its closure earlier this year following coronavirus measures, the team has been working under adapted conditions.

Alcohol marketing generally leads to higher alcohol consumption, also among minors. This is shown by a study by the University of Amsterdam in collaboration with the University of Twente, prompted by the Dutch National Prevention Agreement. The research systematically charted the effects of alcohol marketing.

By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a team of scientists including many from the Anton Pannekoek Institute of the University of Amsterdam have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy's most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars - and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

Sometimes, the inside of a material can determine what happens on the outside. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has devised a new way to make use of this general truth, in particular in systems that do not conserve energy. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants to ten researchers from the UvA and the Academic Medical Center (AMC-UvA, part of Amsterdam UMC). The recipients are: Camiel Boon, Efstratios Gavves, Joppe Hovius, Arno Kret, Dora Matzke, Judith Noorman, Pim van Ooij, Guus Regts, Josje Verhagen and Susanne Wilken.

Unfortunately, our society is not yet free of inequality and discrimination. When you develop artificial intelligence in such an environment, you have to be careful that algorithms do not copy this inequality. UvA neuroinformatician Sennay Ghebreab is committed to AI technology that safeguards values such as equality and privacy.

With Google Streetview and Deep Learning, researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Twente identified how the urban environment is linked to the vitality of social organisations and neighbourhoods. They conclude that, if an environment provides more space to pedestrians, this will be conducive to neighbourhood-based social organisations' chances of survival.

Keeping the streets clean in a dynamic urban environment is one of the major challenges facing Amsterdam City Council. Amsterdam Business School researcher Maarten Sukel developed a system that can recognise rubbish bags and other undesirable objects lying around in the street. The system can spot the object in real time and is based on machine learning.

What makes a photo perfect? This usually was a question of experience and gut feeling for marketers, until recently. PhD candidate Gijs Overgoor went looking for the answer with the help of machine learning, focusing among other things on the visual complexity of images on Instagram. Overgoor divides his time between the Netherlands, where he is conducting research for his PhD at UvA's Amsterdam Business School, and in the United States.