The article presents an obituary for sociologist Sjoerd Groenman.

This article analyses the travel letters of the Dutch medical researcher and early geneticist Marianne van Herwerden (1872–1933) written during a scientific journey to the United States in 1920, and published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine. Aim of the analysis is to trace whether and in what way she changed her scientific identity performance or persona in the wake of the cultural encounter with American science. The construction of a scientific persona implies three related aspects: 1) impressing the (academic) audience with the reliability, credibility or trustworthiness of the scientist (m/f) while 2) making use of a bricolage of old and new repertoires of identity performance that 3) are related to the world of science and to social categories of identity. It means that at any time old repertoires of scientific being can be invoked or discarded, and twisted according to the gender of the protagonist in constituting a convincing scientific persona. In her early career Marianne van Herwerden fashioned herself as the ascetic disembodied scientist, who with small means and a weak body pursued her scientific aims, or even as the aristocratic learned woman, who combined laboratory research with creativity and artistic genius. In contrast to that, her travel letters suggest that she had converted to the standard of American scientific practice and its concomitant ethos of full time dedication, programmatic research and social or practical orientation.

Fik Vening Meinesz (1887-1966) was a Dutch civil engineer, employed by the Dutch Geodetic Committee. He devised an apparatus, containing a system of multiple pendulums, with which he could measure gravity in areas where such measurements would otherwise be impossible. By chance, he was made aware that a submerged submarine, when powered by electromotors, would provide an ideal, sufficiently stable, platform for such measurements at sea. The Dutch Navy, in pursuit of good publicity in the interwar period, gave Vening Meinesz its full support, enabling him to carry out a number of submarine expeditions. His findings stimulated postwar geophysical and geological research, both in the USA and elsewhere. Initially Vening Meinesz used his results to validate the International Gravity Formula, being the closest mathematical representation of the equipotential surface of the Earth at sea level - the geoid. Subsequently he interpreted these results from a tectonophysical perspective, using them to explain the occurrence of the elongated 'Minus' zone of negative gravity anomalies, discovered by him to surround the Indonesian archipelago and which he postulated as being caused by a system of convection currents in the Earth's mantle. Whilst he supported the idea of fixed continents, becoming increasingly opposed to Wegener's idea of drifting continents, his work on mantle convection was to become fundamental to, and incorporated in, the hypothesis of seafloor spreading. This led to the current paradigm of plate tectonics, which interprets the 'Minus' zone as the expression of the boundary between two convergent plates.

Op 66-jarige leeftijd is op 24 april 2018 hoogleraar Paul Verweel overleden. Verweel was grondlegger van de Bestuurs- en Organisatiewetenschap aan de UU. Daarnaast vervulde hij vele bestuursfuncties in de Utrechtse sportwereld. Verweel leed al enige jaren aan prostaatkanker.

Koos van der Werff bezocht enkele jaren het Koninklijk Conservatorium te 's-Gravenhage, maar koos uiteindelijk voor de psychologie.