Despite political uncertainty and funding cuts, the national sector plans for universities are performing well, according to three interim evaluations. The message to the government: keep them in place.
Sunscreen doesn’t cause cancer, and vaccines don’t cause autism. You can keep repeating that ad infinitum, but if you want to debunk misinformation, you’d be better off taking the underlying concerns seriously, says the Rathenau Institute.
First a trade agreement with defense arrangements, and now also a deal on science. Under pressure from geopolitical developments, the EU and Australia are strengthening their ties. On Tuesday, the country officially joined the Horizon Europe science program.
For now, there will be no screening of researchers and master’s students in sensitive fields. “We’re still at the drawing board,” says Minister Letschert. “The current proposal was not feasible.”
What do you do when your solar cells are already so efficient that further development runs up against a limit? Stop? Or devise a new route? At the Photovoltaics Materials and Devices research group (Faculty of EEMCS), they chose option two. Professor of solar cells Olindo Isabella: “What if you stack two innovative cells on top of each other?”
One in three full professors is now a woman, except at TU Delft, TU Eindhoven and the Twente University. However, the increase in the number of women seems to be stagnating among assistant professors and associate professors.
To protect academic freedom, universities should become more democratic. This emerged as the central theme at a national conference on the subject, in which all universities took part.
The first European conference on research security, organised by universities, attracted 480 participants to TU. During ENCORS, the focus was not only on practical knowledge exchange between universities, but also on what the shifting political direction in the United States means for international scientific cooperation.
Clean water from the tap? That is becoming less and less a given, according to the report Caring for Water (Zorg voor Water) by the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure. Water expert Professor Jan Peter van der Hoek explains what we can do about it: “Smart innovation can help, but tackling pollution yields the best results.”
