Research lab
Dutch research university founded in 1575, home to Leiden Observatory and wide-ranging research in astronomy, medicine, and social sciences.
A CSH and Leiden University study of 9.3 million researchers at 3,965 institutions found research topics converging from 2000 to 2020. New hires closely matched their colleagues' topics, though nothing reported shows hiring caused the convergence.
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Amsterdam and Leiden researchers report that humans sort artificial tone sequences mainly by pitch, while zebra finches combine pitch with formant changes. The authors say this challenges the assumption that pitch-based listening is a universal consequence of vocal learning.
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Researchers from Tübingen and Leiden identify a macaque baby tooth over 300,000 years old as the northernmost macaque find in continental Europe. The team judges that macaques had likely reached the northern limit of their range there.
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Wageningen and Leiden researchers have grown the Netherlands' first rice on 0.6 hectares of peat to test whether a wet crop can stop the land sinking. Whether the swap helps the climate depends on how much methane the wet fields give off compared with grassland, and the team is still measuring that.
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Menarche and pregnancy each leave a permanent step down in cortical gray matter. At menopause an Amsterdam-led team found no change at all, and the design compared one scan before the transition with one after.
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A two-scan study of 1,095 female brains in Nature Communications finds the ordinary adult decline in cortical gray matter flattening through late perimenopause and resuming afterward. Its first author says the implications are hard to state.
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A Leiden team modelled food-consumption emissions for 12,228 cities and found the EAT-Lancet diet cutting Amsterdam's by roughly half while raising Dhaka's. Diet and supply-chain efficiency each explain 48% of the gap between cities.
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A Nature Astronomy study of nine ancient galaxies finds faint stars that spectra had missed. The correction runs the wrong way for anyone hoping to explain away impossibly early giants.
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