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Last week NWO announced that it awarded seven proposals for innovative research infrastructure within the programme NWO Investment Grant Large, with a total budget of 17.9 million euros. With this programme, NWO funds large research facilities, within which researchers from throughout the Netherlands work together, often with international partners. Three investments are for the NWO Institutes ASTRON and Nikhef: DUPLLO: Digital Upgrade for Premier LOFAR Low-band Observing (ASTRON), Gravitational waves: the new cosmic messengers (Nikhef) en Searching for Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic-Ray Sources using a new Detector Concept in the Pierre Auger Observatory (Nikhef/Radboud University). The Dutch-Belgian research facility DUBBLE - managed by NWO-I - also received an NWO Investment Grant Large: ‘New x-ray fluorescence and absorption spectroscopy capabilities for DUBBLE’.

The more complex the object, the harder it is to fold up. Space satellites often need many small motors to fold up an instrument, and people have difficulty simply folding up a roadmap. Physicists from Leiden University, University of Amsterdam and NWO Institute AMOLF have now designed a structure that folds itself up in several steps.

Science Weekend is the leading national event for science and technology! On Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 October companies, research institutes, universities and museums will open their doors. Several NWO institutes will also hold an open day during this weekend.

Since 1 September, a new director heads the High Field Magnet Laboratory HFML in Nijmegen: Prof. Peter Christianen. He succeeds Prof. Nigel Hussey who led the lab for five years. HFML generates the strongest continuous magnetic fields in the world and is an international, open-access user facility.

With an innovative new type of receiver, called Apertif, the field of view of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands has been increased 37 times. Apertif, developed by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (NWO Institute ASTRON), will be officially opened today, on 13 September 2018 by deputy Cees Bijl of the Drenthe province. Today the 50-year anniversary of the telescope will also be celebrated.

Apart from a billion Milky Way stars, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft also observes extragalactic objects. Its automated alert system notifies astronomers whenever Gaia spots a transient event. A team of astronomers from NWO Institute SRON have found out that by tweaking the existing automated system, Gaia can be used to detect hundreds of peculiar transients in the centres of galaxies. They found about 480 transients over a period of about a year. Their new method will be implemented in the system as soon as possible allowing astronomers to determine the nature of these events. The findings will be published in the November issue of MNRAS.

On the evening of August 25th in Timmins (Canada), a balloon was launched to 37 km altitude with on board Dutch technology for future direct imaging of exoplanets. The so-called coronagraph is part of the HiCIBaS instrument. The test mission had a three-week launch window and finally received the go-ahead at the end of this period, after ongoing strong winds.

Biological clocks respond differently to light fluctuations

Anybody who has experienced jet lag knows the power of the biological clock. Almost all organisms, from humans to the smallest of bacteria, have a built-in system that tells them whether it is time to rest or to be active. Most biological clocks 'tick' autonomously, but some bacteria depend on light to synchronize their clock every day. Using mathematical calculations, researchers from AMOLF and the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that an autonomous clock suffers far less from noise, such as fluctuations in sunlight due to clouds. The research results were published online on 14 August 2018 in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.