News

It’s a bit of a miracle: brain activity related to language comprehension can be measured as extremely weak electrical signals on the scalp. If the sentence ‘On his sandwich, Jan was having…’ is finished off with the word ‘socks’, this leads to the reader having an N400, a negative peak in the signal that occurs 400 milliseconds after the reader registers the word ‘socks’. Most researchers think that this N400 is a measure of the ease with which a sentence is understood. Harm Brouwer, however, manages to prove this wrong in an article in Brain Research, which is almost certain to result in at least five language comprehension models being discarded.

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), elevated blood pressure in the lungs, is a rare but serious disorder of the blood vessels in the lungs. Although it usually affects adults, it may also develop in childhood. The symptoms in children with PAH are different from those in adults. Children are more likely to suffer brief and sudden periods of unconsciousness than adults. There is also evidence of a characteristic pattern of associated illnesses, including congenital heart defects and other genetic disorders. These are among the findings of a registration study carried out by Professor Rolf Berger from the Paediatric Cardiology department of the Beatrix Children’s Hospital UMCG. Berger concludes that information obtained from research performed in adults with PAH should not be used for diagnosing and treating children with the same condition, without further consideration. The results of the study were recently published in The Lancet.

Onderzoekers het Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen zijn erin geslaagd om een koelelement te ontwikkelen op nanoschaal, dat ze magnetisch aan en uit kunnen schakelen. De werking hiervan is gebaseerd op het magnetisch moment van de elektronen (de spin).

Bas Eenhoorn, burgemeester van Alphen aan den Rijn, spreekt maandag 13 februari de 4de planologielezing uit.

Laura Batstra van de Faculteit Gedrags- en Maatschappijwetenschappen is de winnaar van de Docent van het Jaarprijs 2011. De Publieksprijs en de Webprijs werden gewonnen door Francesco Picchioni  van de Faculteit Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen.

Further information about the research can be found in:

 

M.S. Bügel, P.C. Verhoef, T. Hoving-Wesselius, T. Wiesel, E.de Haan, J.T.Bouma, L.Teunter and T. Alleman (2012), Dutch Customer Performance Index 2012: Univé levert beste klantprestaties. Tijdschrift voor Marketing, February 2012.
(See: http://www.rug.nl/feb/nieuws/archief/2011/120119DCPI2012.pdf [PDF])

P.C. Verhoef, T. Hoving-Wesselius, M.S. Bügel and T. Wiesel (2012), Verbeterde klantprestaties van banken, Economische Statistische Berichten, 3 February 2012

Website: www.dcpi.nl

Gastrointestinal problems such as stitches, diarrhoea and stomach-ache are well known to recreational runners. Rinze ter Steege, who is training to become a gastroenterologist/hepatologist at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and Medisch Spectrum Twente, has investigated the prevalence of these problems. He will be awarded a PhD for his research by the University of Groningen on 8 February 2012.

Researchcentrum SPRINT heeft een subsidie van 1.5 miljoen euro van Samenwerkingsverband Noord-Nederland (SNN) toegekend gekregen. Met deze subsidie zal SPRINT binnenkort 16 nieuwe projecten starten, die allemaal gericht zijn op het bevorderen van de mobiliteit van ouderen. SPRINT, op 29 juni 2011 geopend, krijgt hiermee een vliegende start.

Although Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is faced with a number of challenges,  its personnel policy is both professional and idealistic, according to research by University of Groningen sociologist Valeska Korff. She will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 9 February 2012.

On Thursday 2 February 2012, Education Day is set to take place. The day will begin with a seminar on education which will cover such subjects as the new role of the Boards of Examiners, how to foster talent, broad Bachelor’s degree programmes and IT in teaching. The University of Groningen Lecturer of the Year Award 2011 will take place after the seminar.

Drie Groningse toponderzoekers krijgen ieder anderhalf miljoen euro om de komende vijf jaar onderzoek te doen. Zij ontvangen een Vici uit de Vernieuwingsimpuls van NWO. Vici is een van de grootste persoonsgebonden wetenschappelijke premies van Nederland.

In groep 1 en 2 van de basisschool kunnen kinderen sneller en beter leren rekenen met een meer systematisch opgebouwd onderwijsprogramma. Voor oudere kinderen biedt een rekenaanbod met systematisch gebruik van visuele hulpmiddelen, zoals blokjes en kralenkettingen, veel voordelen. Dit blijkt uit de studie van NWO-onderzoekers Egbert Harskamp en Annemieke Jacobse, beiden werkzaam aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Voor het eerst is aangetoond dat overgewicht in combinatie met roken tijdens de zwangerschap een extra verhoogd risico op hartafwijkingen bij het ongeboren kind geeft, in vergelijking tot beide factoren afzonderlijk. Arts-onderzoeker Marlies Baardman van de afdeling Genetica van het UMCG heeft dit vastgesteld met behulp van de database van Eurocat Noord Nederland. Zij voerde het onderzoek uit in een samenwerkingsverband van de afdelingen Genetica, Kindercardiologie en Epidemiologie van het UMCG. De resultaten zijn deze week gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Heart.

A good night’s sleep is hard to come by in our current 24-hour society. However, a lack of sleep can have a very damaging effect on the brain. The Groningen neurobiologist Peter Meerlo and his colleague Arianna Novati have shown that the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in learning, memory and emotions, even shrinks in rats with chronic sleep deprivation.

On Tuesday 31 January 2012, the University of Groningen Humanities Computing degree programme will celebrate its 25th anniversary. The celebrations will be marked by a symposium and two inaugural lectures by professors in humanities computing at the University, who will discuss how computers understand language.

Making a distinction between ‘good’ subcutaneous abdominal fat and ‘bad’ visceral abdominal fat, which sits under the abdominal muscles and surrounds the organs, is important when determining the risks of developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. To this end, the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) has developed and validated a new ultrasound technique. The technique is cheaper and less burdensome than CT or MRI scans, which are often used for the same purpose. Researcher Emanuella de Lucia Rolfe has demonstrated that measuring abdominal fat with ultrasound gives reliable results in babies, children and adults. De Lucia Rolfe will be awarded a PhD on 30 January 2012 by the University of Groningen for her research.

Animals have smart strategies to defend themselves against predators. Poison frogs are good examples: with bright colours they warn predators that they are distasteful. But why are some poison frogs blue, and others red or yellow?  Research by Martine Maan (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) and Molly Cummings (University of Texas at Austin, USA) provides an answer to this question: colours can predict very accurately how toxic a poison frog is.

Researchers from the Johann Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen,  and from the Centre for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the University of Birmingham/UK, have developed a novel urine test for the diagnosis of adrenal cancer. This breakthrough is reported in the December issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.