I’d known my grandfather Vladimir Konstantinovich Terletsky to be a soft-spoken and kind man. He’s the reason why I’d developed impeccable borsch-cooking skills in early adolescence: he had to have borsch every single day for lunch, and it just wasn’t good enough unless it was prepared by my mother or myself or my sister.

Poetic impression by Bauke Steenhuisen of the dissertation ‘A critical perspective on microarray breast cancer gene expression profiling’ by Herman Sontrop.

De wekker gaat om 6:40u. Om 7:00u groeten we Arno en bestellen we onze vijf yoghurt met fruit, 3 ‘americano’ koffie en 2 cappuccino. Om 7:30u stappen we in onze blauwe Toyota Corolla om vervolgens om 7:45 onze laptops open te klappen.

With its long history, and plenty to see and learn, the Botanische Tuin, or Botanical Gardens, has more to offer than you might have thought.

This week’s StrongStory comes from Olena Stepova, a Ukrainian blogger writing from within the occupied territories of the Luhansk region.

In de loop van het project verandert het tijdsbesef langzaam van ‘we zijn hier nu al…’ in ‘we zijn hier nog maar…’. Zeker nu het eerste concept van het eindrapport worden opgesteld en via WhatsApp de klaagzang over de tentamenweek in Nederland aanzwelt, groeit hier het besef dat we nog maar twee weken in Zuid-Afrika zijn.

I’d heard this quote several times in various contexts in the past few months: earlier, attributed to a Ukrainian revolutionary

Als vrijdag 19 december het figuurlijke fluitsignaal klinkt hebben we de eerste helft van onze ‘wedstrijd’ gespeeld. Er is hard gewerkt, tijd voor wat welverdiende rust.

​2014 was a pretty crappy year for humankind. Protests, wars, terrorist attacks; the rise of religious extremism in the Middle East and the worsening of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the Ebola epidemic in West Africa; an annexation and military occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russia; a new Cold War on the horizon… if only there was a way to shut the door and leave everything in 2014, and step into the New Year in a clean dressing gown, as Ebenezer Scrooge did after a trip through his own dirty past, present, and future in Dickens’ Christmas Carol.