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Following an intensive negotiation process, agreement has been reached with the NWO Central Works Council (in which the CWI Works Council was also represented) and the NIOZ Works Council about one new set of implementing regulations for the entire NWO. The new implementing regulations will come into force on 1 January and have a term of two years. Please find the most important points in the new implementing regulations below. Please find the PDF of the implementing regulations here.

Despite the storm, eighty PhDs and postdocs from NWO-I came to CASA 400 in Amsterdam on Thursday 7 November. There they took part in the fifth edition of the biannual Young Scientists’ Day of NWO-I, a day full of workshops aimed at developing physicists' soft skills. With this day, NWO-I, the Institutes organisation of NWO, wants to encourage PhDs and postdocs to actively explore their future possibilities.

Bacteria can control where they go using a signaling network of protein molecules. Scientists at AMOLF have developed a microscopy method that allows them to see how individual bacteria use this network to make decisions. They discovered that bacteria are surprisingly diverse in personality and mood.
The team publishes its findings in the scientific journal eLife on 12 December.

NWO tries to offer all talented researchers the opportunity to excel. To improve the gender balance among its own research personnel, NWO decided in 2015 to establish a tenure-track programme for female researchers at NWO institutes, Women In Science Excel (WISE). This programme seeks to recruit and facilitate the promotion of female talent, by offering them the possibility to develop an own research group or to continue such a research group at one of the NWO institutes. The WISE programme will provide 20 tenure-track positions over a total of five funding rounds. With a tenure-track appointment, researchers are given the opportunity to demonstrate within a certain period of time that they are good enough to be given a tenured appointment at a university or research institute. Last year NWO awarded the first - four - researchers a WISE grant. NWO…

The outermost layer of ice behaves like liquid water, even at a temperature of –30°C. Physicists at AMOLF have irrefutably demonstrated this using a modern surface-sensitive measuring technique.  At lower temperatures, however, the layer of water becomes increasingly thin. The researchers report their findings on 27 November in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
The slipperiness of ice not only ensures that glaciers slide downhill, but also that we can skate on ice, whereas that is not possible on surfaces like concrete or glass.

In October and November 2017, the boards of ASTRON, CWI, NIOZ, NSCR, SRON and NWO-I decided to merge. With this step, the decision-making process concerning the legal merger has been successfully completed. On 31 December 2017, the solicitor will execute the merger deed, upon which the merger will be a fact on 1 January 2018.

For the first time, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves — ripples in space and time — in addition to light from the spectacular collision of two neutron stars. This marks the first time that a cosmic event has been viewed in both gravitational waves and light. The discovery was made using the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO); the Europe-based Virgo detector; and some 70 ground- and space-based observatories.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 has just been awarded with one half to Rainer Weiss and and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish en Kip S. Thorne, alle three of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".

The Virgo collaboration and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration report the three-detector observation of gravitational waves. This result highlights the scientific potential of a global network of gravitational wave detectors, by delivering a better localization of the source and access to polarizations of gravitational waves. 

Mechanical metamaterials, which exhibit unusual properties such as shape morphing and programmability, have been found to display further surprising features. When the materials are a step in size larger, new rules seem to apply. This was discovered by AMOLF researchers and collaborators from Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam. Their findings are published in Nature Physics on 25 September.