State fragility and conflict continue to be among the most enduring development challenges of the 21st century. The consequences of fragility and conflict on individuals, States and the international community are profound. At the individual level, an estimated 2 billion people or a quarter of the world's…

Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age?

On the 19th of November, Tingting Zheng successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Tingting on this achievement!

How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices.

In what ways do historical and current events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?

Factors affecting galanthamine production in Narcissus

We study expressions of emotion and social decision making across species.

It is the aim of this project to better understand how the physical properties of lipids influences the structure and overall barrier function of the skin.

What political factors affect the speed or duration of EU legislative decision-making?

Jaroslaw Kantorowicz examines how strategic climate litigation influences public attitudes on climate policy, using a UK experiment to explore legal cues.

This thesis applies data mining in commercial settings in the telecommunications industry.

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

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This paper addresses the gap that explores how agencies might allocate their personnel so as to maximise performance with the personnel they have.

A study in the Behavioral Biology group of Carel ten Cate at the IBL showed that experience-dependent and -independent preferences influence song learning in zebra finches.

Source: International Journal of Cosmetic Science, Volume 37, Number 1, pp. 158-158 (2015) ISBN: 0142-5463

Baroque flautist Jed Wentz followed two years of dancing classes in order to develop the right feeling for the gestures required for the Baroque French opera genre ‘tragédie en musique’. In his dissertation, the links between gesture affect and rhythmic freedom in the performance of the tragédie en…

Affective Computing (AC and sometimes called ‘Emotional AI’) provides opportunities to automatically process emotional data. However, is EU data protection law fit for purpose when it is applied to such AC approaches?

The effects on local government of the financial crisis that began in 2007 are still largely unknown. As a case study, Jan Porth conducted statistical analyses of the implications for Dutch municipal finances. The crisis became most apparent in the sale of municipal land to private companies and households.…

Man-made sounds in and around the oceans stress marine life and have an impact on marine species and ecosystems by changing the underwater acoustic climate. Hans Slabbekoorn from the Institute of Biology Leiden pleads for technical solutions to mitigate problems of noise pollution. Science review paper…

The travel ban and closed borders have had a big impact on our students and staff. Some are stranded abroad, while others are stranded here in the Netherlands. Others again have returned early to their home country. Three personal stories from Wuhan, Leiden and The Hague.

An assessment of Libyan legislation

It doesn’t take long before Tim van Lit has told us what interests him: problems that shake the nation. This 28-year-old Criminology alumnus heads a team of 25 at Royal Netherlands Marechaussee. Location: Schiphol Airport.

Using N2 dissociation on Ru(0001) as a representative showcase (for catalysts employed in the Haber-Bosch process), we have shown for the first time that non-adiabatic effects can substantially reduce a molecule’s dissociation probability on a metal surface. These effects are currently completely unaccounted…

How can the academic world best handle the new political reality in the United States? This is the question that managers, lecturers, researchers and students at Leiden University discussed on Friday afternoon at a gathering in the Kamerlingh Onnes building. ‘Don’t just give in; defend academic free…

One of the recurring points of discussion within the Criminal Justice research programme is the question of what behaviour should or should not fall within the scope of criminal law. This research theme is examined from a legal-dogmatic and social-scientific perspective.

The Municipality of Veere wants to limit accommodation for tourists. However, this puts a number of council members in a dilemma. Are they allowed to debate the future of tourism in the area while being landlords themselves? Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, comments…

Childcare, no access to labs and extra time for online teaching. These are the main reasons why young researchers at Leiden University have seen a significant drop in their productive working hours since the beginning of lockdown. These are the results of a Young Academy Leiden survey of over 200 early-career…

Researchers at Leiden University have mapped genes that cause breast cancer cells to migrate. The Leiden toxicologists Professor Bob van de Water, Dr Wies van Roosmalen, Dr Sylvia E. Le Dévédec and colleagues studied 1500 individual genes. They found eight, including the SRPK1 gene, that regulate the…

A group of chemists, that includes Sander van Kasteren and Hermen Overkleeft, has discovered that azides, a certain type of chemical compound, can determine whether or not T cells respond to or ignore a vaccine. Their discovery is set to be published in Angewandte Chemie.

Forum editors: Seda Gürkan, Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA), Leiden University, s.gurkan@fgga.leidenuniv.nl and Özlem Terzi, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, o.terzi@vu.nl

Optimization, mechanisms of action and predictors of the outcome of light therapy in depression: A multicenter randomized trial

Time-series forecasting through modelling sequences of temporally dependent observations has many industrial and scientific applications. While machine learning models have been widely used to create time-series forecasting models, creating efficient and performant time-series forecasting models is…