Residents in the Groningen province received a scary start to Sunday morning when an earthquake measuring 2.5 on the Richter Scale shook the ground and rattled windows. The earthquake took place at 7 a.m. with an epicenter located below the small village of Garrelsweer.
"It was a huge bang. For a moment I thought there was a truck on its side," Garrelsweer resident Sibrand Bakker told the Telegraaf.
Astronomers managed to produce the first ever picture of an event horizon - a black hole's edge - by stringing together a global network of radio telescopes. "We have seen the gates of hell at the end of space and time", astrophysicist Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen said about the picture at a press conference in Brussels, science journal Nature reports.
The number of cats and dogs used for medical experiments increased by 49 percent in 2017. In that year 909 dogs and 200 cats were used as lab animals, compared to 656 dogs and 89 cats in 2016, AD reports based on figures from the Dutch food and consumer product safety authority NVWA.
Half of the laboratory dogs and a third of the cats did not survive the experiments in 2017, according to the newspaper.
Playing games - any type of game ranging from puzzles to video games - makes you more intelligent, according to a study by University of Amsterdam researchers Jessica Piotrowski and Patti Valkenburg, and Karin Fikkers from the University of Utrecht. "We have to adjust our negative image of games", Piotrowski said to Fiola.
While perhaps more commonly known for floods than droughts, The Netherlands is allocating seven million euros to combat excessively dry seasons in the country. The money will be used to build larger water reservoirs in sandy areas, to monitor levels of evaporation, and to reduce the impact of salinization on drinking water production, the government announced on Friday.
Researchers found a Dutch shipwreck from early in the 16th century while cleaning up containers that went overboard from the MSC Zoe on New Year's eve. This is the oldest shipwreck ever discovered in Dutch waters, the National Cultural Heritage Agency said on Wednesday.
Three skeletons were found during archeological excavations in Den Bosch. The skeletons are believed to be soldiers who died during the siege of the city in the Eighty Years' War in the 17th century. Two skeletons were excavated during the past few days. The third skeleton is in the process of being excavated on Thursday, NOS reports.
In an open letter published in Trouw, 350 Dutch scientists expressed support for school pupils protesting for the climate on Thursday. It is expected that around 10 thousand Dutch pupils will skip school on Thursday to call on the government to do more against climate change.
The Veterinary Medicine faculty of Utrecht University 3D printed a skull cap for a dog - a premier in Europe. The dog had a benign tumor removed from the skull bone last year and the tumor was so large that he needed a new skull cap, NU.nl reports.
A Dutch pre-teen is winning high praise around the Netherlands for racing around the country to play the piano in a fundraising effort. Bas Schipper set a record by playing all the pianos located at 16 different train stations in 18 hours and 10 minutes, breaking the previous record set by Ernesto Dennis by 75 minutes.
In doing so, he managed to raise €61,835 for diabetes research, as of Monday afternoon. The total far exceeded the goal the boy set.
For the first time ever, researchers successfully put a fish species on contraception. Dutch biologist Max Janse and vet Henk Luten of Burgers' Zoo implanted a straw full of hormones into an extremely fertile eagle ray, after which she stopped producing offspring. Two years later the researchers published their results this week, NOS reports.
Two brothers found over a hundred Roman coins near the Noord-Brabant town of Berlicum. These silver and bronze coins date from the first and second century AD, the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency announced after conducting a long-term study into the background of the coins.
Advances in DNA identification techniques led to the identification of a body found in 2001 in Belgium. The body of Corrie van der Valk was buried in Philippeville, Belgium that same year. The 58-year-old woman was struck by a train near Namur, Belgium, and caused extensive damage as to make identification impossible at the time.
The Van der Valk family was notified of the discovery on Thursday. One of her relatives told the AD, "We are sad, but also relieved that there is now clarity after so many years."
Minister Carola Schouten of Agriculture wants to use a "light form" of genetic modification as part of her efforts to make agriculture in the Netherlands more sustainable. She is currently working with companies, farmers and Wageningen University to investigate the possibilities for experimenting with the so-called CRISPR-Cas method. She will send parliament a letter about their progress in the coming weeks, she said to the Volkskrant.
Dutch universities are worried that the supply of lecturers in Artificial Intelligence will dry up - the vast majority of PhD graduates in this field are opting to enter the business world or teach at an American university, Financieele Dagblad reports.
American universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are increasingly given the opportunity to invest in AI. MIT recently announced a 1 billion dollar investment in a new AI center. Dutch universities can not compete with this financial strength.
Museum Huis van Hulde reconstructed the face of a Russian soldier who was killed in a battle in Castricum in 1799. The soldier's skeleton was discovered in the dunes last year. His origin was determined with a DNA investigation, and his face was reconstructed using forensic techniques, according to the museum. The reconstructed soldier will form part of the museum's Vijand in het Zand exhibition from Friday.
Archeologists discovered around 125 meters of Roman road along Ingenieur G. Tjalmaweg in the municipality of Katwijk. The road was built 2 thousand years ago. A Roman settlement was also found, ANP reports.
The province of Zuid-Holland asked archeologists study the area in preparation for the RijnlandRoute, a new road from Katwijk to the A4 at Leiden.
After this year's hot summer, the Netherlands and the rest of the world can expect another four unusually warm years, according to a new statistical analysis of the world temperature by Sybren Drijfhout of the Dutch meteorological institute KNMI and French colleague Florian Sevellec from the University of Brest, the Volkskrant reports.
A special Dutch radio receiver went into space with a Chinese rocket on Sunday night. The receiver - actually three antennas made of fiberglass - will be used to capture signals that may say something about the origin of the earth, NOS reports.
Refugees with a scientific background may soon find it easier to find work in the Dutch academic world. Science financier NWO in The Hague is launching an experiment in which refugee scientists can get an appointment with a Dutch research group, NOS reports.
This experiment involves 750 thousand euros, enough to appoint eight to 15 people with a master's or doctor's degree for a year. The program, called Refugees in Science, was established in cooperation with KNAW, De Jonge Akademie and and the Dutch foundation for Refugee Students.
The Biomedical Primate Research Center (BPRC) in Rijswijk used 317 monkeys in its tests last year, compared to 95 in 2016. Last year 137 of these animals died, AD reports.
Ronald Bontrop, BPRC director, told AD that the increase is due the the fact that "a long-term experiment with tuberculosis was completed last year". According to him, the monkeys involved in this experiment have been tested on for some time, but were only included in the count of last year - the year in which the experiment finished.
VDL in Eindhoven is going to help the European Southern Observatory build the largest telescope in the world. Tens of millions of euros are involved in this project, Omroep Brabant reports.
A student at Eindhoven University of Technology accidentally discovered a method to make a medicine against breast cancer much cheaper, NU.nl reports.
The student, working under lead researcher Lech-Gustav Milroy, conicidentally discovered that the substance Z-endoxifen, which can be used as a cancer medication, can be made in its pure form in one step. This discovery makes an extra step in the production process superfluous, and therefore makes the production process cheaper.
Chinese space station Tiangong-1 is about to crash, sometime between Friday and Monday, experts expect. Where the space station will re-enter earth's atmosphere, and whether any debris will actually reach the earth, is still unclear. But it is very unlikely that the Netherlands will be hit, Stijn Lemmens of the European Space Agency (ESA) said to broadcaster NOS.
