Latest news with #UniversityofAmsterdam
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Misophonia Has Genetic Links to Depression And Anxiety, Study Finds
Most of us can relate to feeling uncomfortable when someone scrapes their nails down a chalkboard. For those suffering the condition misophonia, sounds like slurping, snoring, breathing, and chewing and draw an equally stressful response. A study published in 2023 by researchers in the Netherlands suggests the condition shares genes with mood disorders such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. University of Amsterdam psychiatrist Dirk Smit and colleagues analyzed the genetic data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, UK Biobank, and 23andMe databases and found people who self-identified as having misophonia were more likely to have genes associated with psychiatric disorders, as well as tinnitus. Watch the clip below for a summary on their findings. Patients with tinnitus – a persistent, shrill ringing in the ears – are also more likely to have psychological symptoms of depression and anxiety. "There was also an overlap with PTSD genetics," Smit told Eric W. Dolan at PsyPost. "This means that genes that give a sensitivity to PTSD also increase the likelihood for misophonia, and that could point to a shared neurobiological system that affects both. And that could suggest that treatment techniques used for PTSD could also be used for misophonia." This doesn't mean misophonia and these other conditions necessarily have shared mechanisms, only that some of the genetic risk factors may be similar. Previous research found people who experience misophonia are more likely to internalize their distress. Smit and team's research, published in 2023, also backed this up, showing strong links with personality traits such as worry, guilt, loneliness, and neuroticism. Responses to a triggering sound can range from irritation and anger to distress that interferes with everyday life. "It has been argued… that misophonia is based on the feelings of guilt about the evoked irritation and anger rather than behavioral expressions of anger itself that causes the distress," write Smit and team. People with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD) were less likely to experience misophonia. This was unexpected as those with ASD have a decreased tolerance to sounds. "Our results suggest that misophonia and ASD are relatively independent disorders with regard to genomic variation," the researchers write in their paper. "It raises the possibility that other forms of misophonia exist, one that is mostly driven by conditioning of anger or other negative emotionality to specific trigger sounds moderated by personality traits." Smit and colleagues caution their data was mostly European so the same links may not show up in different populations. What's more, misophonia was not medically diagnosed in their data samples, only self-reported which may also skew the results. But their study also provides clues for where further research could focus to find the biological mechanism behind misophonia. A 2023 survey suggests misophonia is more prevalent than previously thought, making studies like this one invaluable for understanding how our perception of the world links with our mind's ability to cope within it. This research was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. An earlier version of this article was published in October 2024. Experimental Drug Helped Cancer Patients Live 40% Longer in Clinical Trial Leprosy Was Lurking in The Americas Long Before Colonization, Study Finds Does Retinol Reverse Signs of Aging? Here's The Science.
Middle East Eye
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Top genocide scholars unanimous that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza: Dutch investigation
A growing number of the world's leading genocide scholars believe that Israel's actions in Gaza constitute genocide, according to an investigation by Dutch newspaper NRC. The paper interviewed seven renowned genocide researchers* from six countries - including Israel - all of whom described the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocidal. Many said their peers in the field share this assessment. "Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence," Israeli researcher Raz Segal told NRC. Professor Ugur Umit Ungor of the University of Amsterdam and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies said that while there are certainly researchers who say it is not genocide, "I don't know them". The Dutch paper reviewed 25 recent academic articles published in the Journal of Genocide Research, the field's leading journal, and found that 'all eight academics from the field of genocide studies see genocide or at least genocidal violence in Gaza'. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters 'And that is remarkable for a field in which there is no clarity about what genocide itself exactly is,' it noted. Leading human rights organisations have also reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organisation to conclude that Israel had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, while Human Rights Watch more conservatively concluded that "genocidal acts" had been committed. Francesca Albanese, the UN's top expert on Palestine, authored two reports last year suggesting that genocide was taking place in Gaza. Genocide studies as a discipline does not treat the issue as a binary, the NRC report said. Rather than asking whether genocide has happened or not, scholars see it as a gradual process. Ungor compares it to a 'dimmer switch' rather than an on-off light. 'Contrary to public opinion, leading genocide researchers are surprisingly unanimous: the Netanyahu government, they say, is in that process - according to the majority, even in its final stages,' the investigation concluded. 'That is why most researchers no longer speak only of 'genocidal violence', but of 'genocide'.' 'It happens because it happens' The report noted that even researchers who had previously hesitated to use the term have since changed their position, such as Shmuel Lederman of the Open University of Israel. It also referred to the opinion of Canadian international law scholar William Schabas that Israel is committing genocide, although he is considered otherwise conservative with genocide labelling. In an interview with Middle East Eye last month, Schabas said Israel's campaign in Gaza was "absolutely" a genocide. "There's nothing comparable in recent history," said Schabas. "The borders are closed, the people have nowhere to go, and they're destroying have made life essentially impossible in Gaza. "We see that combined with the ambition, expressed sometimes very openly by both Trump and Netanyahu, and by the Israelis, to reconfigure Gaza as some sort of eastern Mediterranean Riviera." Israel's inaction following the January 2024 interim ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was a decisive factor in leading many scholars to conclude that its conduct in Gaza amounts to genocide, NRC reported. The legally binding ruling ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent genocide by allowing aid into Gaza and stopping dehumanising rhetoric that incited the extermination of Palestinians. Lederman initially opposed the use of the genocide label. However, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dismissal of the ICJ's ruling, the continued closure of land crossings to Gaza and a letter by 99 US health workers stating that the death toll in Gaza exceeded 100,000, he was convinced that Israel's actions do in fact constitute genocide. Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel's deliberate denial of food, water, shelter and sanitation was the key factor in her determination that the military campaign was a genocide. Israel's war on Gaza: What is the meaning of genocide? Read More » For all scholars interviewed by NRC, what ultimately influenced their assessment was the holistic view of the situation, the totality of the conduct and the sum of all war crimes viewed together. The scholars also refuted claims in western public debate that Israel's military campaign is solely aimed at defeating Hamas, that there is no explicit plan to annihilate the population, that the entire Gaza population has not been killed, that the situation is unlike the Holocaust or that a legal ruling has yet to be issued. They argued that these points reflect fundamental misunderstandings of how genocide is defined under international law. The Genocide Convention refers to the partial or complete destruction of a group, not solely its total eradication. For example, the killing of 8,000 Bosniak men in Srebrenica in 1995 is legally recognised as genocide, despite being smaller in scale than the Holocaust. O'Brien noted that genocide is not dependent on judicial confirmation to be real. 'It happens because it happens.' The backdrop to the investigation, NRC reported, is a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Nineteen months into Israel's onslaught on the Palestinian enclave, at least 53,000 Palestinians have been killed - including more than 15,000 children - while a quarter of all babies are acutely malnourished amid Israel's ban on humanitarian aid. *The scientists interviewed by NRC are: Shmuel Lederman: Israeli researcher at the Open University of Israel Anthony Dirk Moses: Australian professor at the City University of New York and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research Melanie O'Brien: Australian lawyer, researcher at the University of Western Australia and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Raz Segal: Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey, US Martin Shaw: British professor at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex and author of the book What Is Genocide? Ugur Umit Ungor: Dutch professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Iva Vukusic: Croatian genocide researcher at Utrecht University
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Why scientists are so excited about the highest-energy 'ghost particle' ever seen
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Earlier this year, an underwater detector in the Mediterranean Sea found the most energetic neutrino to date. And scientists are still talking about it because, well, this discovery could be a really big deal. Not only could this neutrino, also known as a "ghost particle," have been fleeing a gamma-ray burst or a supermassive black hole, but it could also have been produced by an ultra-powerful cosmic ray interacting with the cosmic microwave background (CMB). That latter bit which we'll get to soon, could be huge. Moreover, the detector that pinpointed this particle isn't even totally built yet — once put together, who knows what it can accomplish. "We're excited to have observed this event and we're hungry and curious for more," KM3NeT's spokesperson, Paul de Jong of the University of Amsterdam, told For some background, the neutrino was detected on February 13, 2023 by the European Union-funded KM3NeT, the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope. Neutrinos are ghostly particles because they have very little mass and rarely interact with other forms of matter, making them very difficult to detect. Trillions of neutrinos are passing through your body every second, yet you cannot tell. Scientists have to be patient to spot even one neutrino. Modern neutrino detectors are placed in water, and particularly in the dark. Sometimes that water is held in a tank, as was the case with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, as well as with Super-Kamiokande in Japan. Other times, that water is frozen in the ground, as in the case of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. But it's also possible for neutrino detectors to literally be dipped into the sea, as is the case with KM3NeT, which extends as deep as 2.17 miles (3.5 kilometers) below the waves. The reason water is so important is that, occasionally, a neutrino will interact with a molecule of water. The energies involved can be so great that the collision smashes the water molecule apart into a bunch of daughter nuclei and particles, specifically muons. The muons travel quickly, almost as fast as light in a vacuum, and definitely faster than light through water — the refractive index of water slows light down to approximately 738,188,976 feet per second (225,000,000 meters per second) compared to 983,571,056 feet per second (299,792,458 meters per second) in a vacuum. Because the muons travel faster than light in water, they give off the equivalent of a sonic boom in the form of a flash of light. This light is called Cherenkov radiation. KM3NeT consists of two detectors. The first, called ORCA, is 8,038 feet (2,450 meters) deep off the coast of France and is designed to study how neutrinos oscillate between different types of neutrinos. The other, aka the detector that spotted the new energetic neutrino — which has been catalogued as KM3-230213A — is called ARCA and is located off the coast of Sicily. Both ARCA and ORCA are still under construction. When complete, ARCA will feature 230 vertical detection lines descending into the sea. Each will be lined with 18 optical modules containing 31 photomultiplier tubes that can spot flashes of Cherenkov radiation in the darkness at those depths. At the time that ARCA detected KM3-230213A, only 21 of its detection lines were in operation. The muon ARCA detected had an energy of 120 PeV (1,000 trillion, or quadrillion, electronvolts), which implies the neutrino that produced it must have had a record-breaking energy of 220 PeV. This is 100 quadrillion times more energetic than visible-light photons, and 30 times more energetic than the neutrino that held the previous energy record. Muons can travel several miles through the sea before being absorbed, and KM3NeT detected the muon traveling horizontally rather than straight down to the sea floor. "The horizontal direction on the muon is very relevant," said de Jong. Muons can also be formed in cosmic-ray spallation, wherein a cosmic ray enters Earth's atmosphere and collides with a molecule or atom, smashing it apart into a shower of subatomic particles. Muons formed in this manner can either reach the surface or enter the ocean while traveling straight down — not horizontally. To have been moving horizontally, the muon must have instead "been created close to the detector, and the only realistic scenario is that it was created by a high-energy neutrino," said de Jong. A neutrino of 220 PeV is unprecedented. No environment or object known in our Milky Way galaxy could have produced a neutrino with so much energy. That means its origin must be extragalactic, perhaps created in the violence of a star exploding and producing a gamma-ray burst, or a supermassive black hole ripping a star or gas cloud to shreds with its titanic gravitational tidal forces. Because neutrinos are not deflected by magnetic fields or by gravity, their direction of travel leads back to their source. "The muon direction is almost identical to the direction of the original neutrino, so we can play the game of pointing it back to its cosmic origin," said de Jong. That origin is somewhere in the direction of the constellation of Orion, the Hunter. However, while there are numerous active galaxies with supermassive black holes in that region, none of them was displaying activity at the time that could explain the neutrino, nor was a gamma-ray burst detected from that direction at that time. But another intriguing possibility is that KM3-230213A is the first "cosmogenic" neutrino to be discovered, produced when an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray smashes into a photon belonging to the cosmic microwave background, which is the residual light released 379,000 years after the Big Bang. It would take an extremely energetic cosmic ray to be able to produce a neutrino like KM3-230213A. Cosmic rays in excess of 100,000 PeV have been detected by the likes of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. Their origins are uncertain, but, in theory every time such a cosmic ray encounters a CMB photon, the collision can produce neutrinos as energetic as KM3-230213A. The greater the cosmic-ray energy, the greater its interaction cross-section, meaning it is more likely to interact with CMB photons. The constant interactions between cosmic rays and CMB photons slows the cosmic ray, limiting their kinetic energy. This is called the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin (GZK) limit. Related Stories: — Scientists detect highest-energy ghost particle ever seen — where did it come from? — Black holes snacking on small stars create particle accelerators that bombard Earth with cosmic rays — Einstein wins again! Quarks obey relativity laws, Large Hadron Collider finds The possibility of a cosmogenic neutrino excites de Jong. "It would be the very first observation of a cosmogenic neutrino, and it would be the first confirmation of the GZK cut-off outside charged cosmic rays — and even there the proof is ambiguous," he said. Furthermore, the energy of cosmogenic neutrinos can reveal the properties of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. This parameter is key for discovering whether such phenomena are made of just protons or heavier atomic nuclei — and, therefore, what produces them. Although KM3-230213A was the only extremely high energy neutrino detected by KM3NeT, there will undoubtedly be many more passing through Earth that go undetected. Does KM3NeT's early detection with ARCA bode well for finally being able to detect such neutrinos more regularly? "We certainly hope so!" said de Jong. "But realistically, other experiments such as IceCube have been taking data for longer and have not observed such an event, so we could simply have been lucky." The discovery was described in a paper published on Feb. 12 in the journal Nature.
New Indian Express
11-05-2025
- General
- New Indian Express
Dutch-led Suriname team digitises 100,000 documents to preserve Jewish history in the Caribbean
AMSTERDAM: The fire that caused significant damage in April to historic buildings in Suriname's capital city was not the only threat facing the nearby Neveh Shalom Synagogue. As firefighters battled to save the historic city center of Paramaribo — a UNESCO World Heritage site — the synagogue's volunteers were busy scanning thousands of archival documents in an effort to preserve the history of the thousands of Jews who have called the Surinamese capital home since the 1700s. The blaze was contained before reaching the synagogue, but at the mercy of other threats, including the tropical climate, insects and time, it was a reminder of how fragile the 100,000 historic documents, kept on pages stored in filing cabinets for decades, were and how vital the preservation project was. The operation to digitize the birth records, land sales and correspondence has been overseen by Dutch academic Rosa de Jong, who had used the archive as part of a PhD study on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including the tiny South American country of Suriname. 'I felt that my work comes with an obligation to preserve the past that I'm building my career on,' De Jong told The Associated Press. When she finished her academic research, at the University of Amsterdam, last year, De Jong saw an opportunity to return to Suriname and safeguard the files that had been crucial to her work. She raised the financing for cameras, hard drives and travel expenses and returned to Suriname with the aim of making high-quality scans of the hundreds of folios held by the synagogue. The result is more than 600 gigabytes of data stored on multiple hard drives. One will be donated to the National Archives of Suriname to be included in their digital collections. The archived documents show how Suriname was a hub of Jewish life for the Americas. The British who colonized the region gave Jews political and religious autonomy when they first moved to Suriname in 1639 to manage tobacco and sugar cane plantations.
11-05-2025
- General
Dutch-led Suriname team digitizes documents to preserve Jewish history in Caribbean
AMSTERDAM -- The fire that caused significant damage in April to historic buildings in Suriname's capital city was not the only threat facing the nearby Neveh Shalom Synagogue. As firefighters battled to save the historic city center of Paramaribo — a UNESCO World Heritage site — the synagogue's volunteers were busy scanning thousands of archival documents in an effort to preserve the history of the thousands of Jews who have called the Surinamese capital home since the 1700s. The blaze was contained before reaching the synagogue, but at the mercy of other threats, including the tropical climate, insects and time, it was a reminder of how fragile the 100,000 historic documents, kept on pages stored in filing cabinets for decades, were and how vital the preservation project was. The operation to digitize the birth records, land sales and correspondence has been overseen by Dutch academic Rosa de Jong, who had used the archive as part of a PhD study on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including the tiny South American country of Suriname. 'I felt that my work comes with an obligation to preserve the past that I'm building my career on,' De Jong told The Associated Press. When she finished her academic research, at the University of Amsterdam, last year, De Jong saw an opportunity to return to Suriname and safeguard the files that had been crucial to her work. She raised the financing for cameras, hard drives and travel expenses and returned to Suriname with the aim of making high-quality scans of the hundreds of folios held by the synagogue. The result is more than 600 gigabytes of data stored on multiple hard drives. One will be donated to the National Archives of Suriname to be included in their digital collections. The archived documents show how Suriname was a hub of Jewish life for the Americas. The British who colonized the region gave Jews political and religious autonomy when they first moved to Suriname in 1639 to manage tobacco and sugar cane plantations. When the Dutch took control of the colony, they continued this practice. When Jewish people were forced out of other places in the Americas, they often fled to Suriname. On Christmas Eve in 1942, more than 100 Dutch Jewish refugees, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Paramaribo. Liny Pajgin Yollick, then 18, was among them. In an oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she described the relief she felt when she arrived in Suriname to the sound of a familiar song. 'I remember it was morning and they played Dutch National Anthem for us when we arrived, and everybody was crying. We were very emotional when we heard that because many of us never thought we would ever hear it again,' she said. When the Netherlands was freed from Nazi German occupation three years later, Teroenga, the magazine published for the Jewish congregations in Suriname, ran with the headline 'Bevrijding' ('Liberation'). The archive at Neveh Shalom has a copy of every edition of Teroenga. Key to De Jong's preservation project has been 78-year-old Lilly Duijm, who was responsible for the archive's folders of documents for more than two decades. Born in Suriname, when she was 14 she moved to the Netherlands where she eventually became a nurse. But she returned to her homeland in 1973, just before the colony got its independence, and her four children grew up in Paramaribo. More than anyone, she knows how precious the archive was. 'I told the congregation, as long as the archive is still here, I will not die. Even if I live to be 200 years old,' she tearfully told AP. 'This is keeping the history of my people.'
