Those pesky raindrops that get you wet on your way to work, are formed high up in the sky from clouds of water vapour. The process of nucleation describes the way this happens. Edgar Blokhuis of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry developed a theory to describe this transition more precisely. Chemists…

How can ecosystem services within river catchments be quantified in spatial and temporal explicit way?

To generate electricity, power plants use huge amounts of water. In Europe and the United States, generating electricity is accountable for 40% of the total water withdrawal. PhD candidate Industrial Ecology Yi Jin devoted his research to the water footprint of power plants and the impact on the environment.…

Electrolysis is a technique that can be used to convert CO2 into fuels and other useful products. To do this efficiently and on a large scale, however, we need to understand exactly how electrolysis works. Professor Marc Koper is an expert in this field.

While colloidal aggregates are often undesirable due to their random shapes, we exploit them as a starting point to synthesize patchy particles.

On Monday 14 November, the first spadeful of earth was dug for the construction of the Living Lab, an experimental test site to study living organisms in freshwater. A total of 36 ditches will be dug out to create a natural environment where researchers can study the effects of chemical compounds from…

We, as LUGO, believe that with simple everyday actions we can prevent large amounts of single-use plastic water bottles from entering our oceans.

Paul Hudson, a professor at Leiden University College, is organising a symposium on water management in the Netherlands and abroad that will take place on 22 March. We asked him what makes water management so important.

The coal-power energy sector is using enormous amounts of fresh water which is projected to negatively affect lives and the ecological balance of the surrounding region. This is the conclusion of the new report The Unquenchable Thirst of Energy Production, published by Greenpeace Bulgaria and Leiden…

Professor Ewine van Dishoeck, together with an international team of colleagues, has written an overview of everything we know about water in interstellar clouds thanks to the Herschel space observatory. The article, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, summarizes existing knowledge and…

An international research consortium led by Bob van de Water, Professor of Toxicology at Leiden University, has been awarded a prestigious Horizon2020 grant of 30 million euros.

The Fine Mechanical Department's (FMD) new Wardjet A0612 will cut anything using a 4000 bar water jet. This enables the FMD to work faster, more accurately, and to perform more versatile jobs.

MERCOSUR recently renewed its commitment to and support for contributing to the improvement of drinking water and sanitation in Paraguay, a member state which faces challenges in this area particularly for lower socioeconomic and vulnerable groups.

About 15 km to the south of the ancient city of Petra, archaeologists from the University of Leiden have discovered an impressive network of ancient water conservation measures and irrigated field systems.

Research using the ALMA telescope by scientists including Leiden's John Tobin and Steven Bos has produced the first images of the water snow line within a protoplanetary disc. Publication in Nature on 14 July.

GLOBOX is a spatially differentiated multimedia fate, exposure and effect model. It is used for the calculation of spatially differentiated LCA characterisation factors on a global scale.

Using a clever experiment, PhD candidate Shengxiang Yang discovered how gold electrodes convert water into oxygen. He is the first to unravel the mechanism of this reaction. Yang published his results in the journal ACS Catalysis.

Nowadays data-driven working is very important within Rijkswaterstaat. A Variety of employees is involved in analyzing the data collected on daily basis by Rijkswaterstaat. The goal is to ensure that we construct an infrastructure in the Netherlands which will be safe, accessible and liveable in the…

From surface science towards industrial practice using high-pressure scanning tunneling microscopy.

The current hepatitis B vaccines need to be stored and transported under refrigerated conditions (2-8 degrees C). This dependence on a cold-chain is highly challenging in areas where hepatitis B virus infections are endemic.

Promotor: V. Vitelli, Co-promotor: J. Paulose

Yousef Yousef (39), a successful entrepreneur in the water-quality industry, recently joined the Advisory Board at Leiden Law School. Read the interview about his career.

Thanks to modern technology, it is now possible to extract more gas and oil in the eastern part of the Mediterranean than in the past. As a result, a conflict has once again erupted between Turkey and Greece, in which Turkey is making claim to part of the Mediterranean Sea around Cyprus.

The focus throughout this thesis will be on gathering fundamental studies of the detailed structure and composition of the electrode/electrolyte interface effect on the rate and mechanism of key electrocatalytic reactions.

Promotor: J.W.M. Frenken, Co-Promotor: R. Felici

Twenty years from now, the world population is estimated to be around 9 billion people (now 8 billion). In combination with the improvements in living standards and the corresponding growth in consumption, this will result in an enormous increase in the demand for food, consumables, water and energy.…

Graphene floating on water does not repel water, as many researchers believe, but rather attracts it. This has been demonstrated by chemists Liubov Belyaeva and Pauline van Deursen and their supervisor Grégory F. Schneider. Publication in Advanced Materials.

The transition to new and renewable energy sources should be completed by 2050. Researchers in various disciplines at Leiden University are conducting unique research that will help us make this transition and reduce CO2 emissions.

Student of International Studies Susanne Reitsma has a remarkable passion: water. In April 2015, she was elected vice president of the World Youth Parliament for Water, in which capacity she works for worldwide access to clean drinking water and sanitation. What does Suzanne find so special about water?…

Artificial photosynthesis has recognised potential to produce green and sustainable fuels from earth-abundant resources such as water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight.

Following the Beirut explosion, BBC's podcast series The Foodchain explores the chemical that caused the blast: ammonium nitrate. A compound that is widely used to produce fertilizer. Professor of Environmental sustaibability Jan Willem Erisman tells about the effects of nitrogen on the environment.

High resolution altitude data created by airborne LiDAR allow the investigation of large areas and often inaccessible tracts of land and has the potential to reveal undiscovered archaeological heritage.

Metals surfaces form a group of effective catalysts for the reaction of small molecules such as hydrogen (H2).

With increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and their detrimental effect on the global climate, modern society needs to push for more renewable energy sources. Storing widely accessible and abundant solar energy in chemical bonds in the form of molecular fuel via artificial photosynthesis…

When mosquito eggs hatch in nutrient-rich water, the mosquitoes are larger and they can also fly further. That is the first conclusion of a study from by the Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH) by PhD-student Sam Boerlijst.

A leak developed in the mains water supply in the new building of Leiden University’s Faculty of Science at the Wassenaarseweg on Tuesday evening.

Density functional theory (DFT) with so-called semi-local exchange has been remarkable accurate for some dissociative chemisorption reactions on metals, but it has notoriously failed for others. A team of researchers from the University of California at Irvine and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry have…

Promotores: Prof.dr. J. A. Bouwstra, Prof.dr. W. Jiskoot

Majorana fermions in superconductors are the subgap quasiparticle excitations that are their own antiparticles.

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Prof.dr. J.C.T. Eijkel (Twente University)