The world of competitive gaming is incredibly popular and has mushroomed into a billion-dollar industry. In 2019, over five thousand tournaments were organized around the world with 28,000 players participating. And that's just the tournaments that are played for prize money. It is expected that gaming will gain even more popularity over the coming years. Nevertheless, many companies and institutions are not yet taking this trend seriously. This is not the case with the University of Twente.

Twelve young researchers from all fields of science will receive a KNAW Early Career Award. The award, which is given annually, consists of a sum of 15,000 euros and a work of art for each of the laureates. The Award is intended for researchers in the Netherlands who are at the beginning of their careers and who have innovative, original ideas. UT researcher Annemieke Witteveen receives the award for, among other things, her research on a method to predict the risk of breast cancer recurrence. She is the first UT researcher to receive the award.

Heart-on-a-Chip devices are microfluidic devices that enable the replication of a human heart at the microscale. The adoption of these devices has not reached its full potential. For his doctoral thesis, Aisen Gabriel de Sá Vivas developed a fluidic circuit board with standard connections to connect Heart-on-a-Chip devices without tubes. He will defend his thesis on 30 November.

The Earth’s mantle makes up about 85% of the Earth’s volume and is made of solid rock. But what rock types is the mantle exactly made of, and how are they distributed throughout the mantle? An international team of researchers – including UT researcher Dr Juan Carlos Afonso (Faculty of ITC) – have been able to reveal the existence of pockets of rocks with abnormal properties that suggest that they were once created at the surface, transported to vast depths along subduction zones, and accumulated at specific depths inside the Earth’s mantle.