For the second consecutive year, a team from the UvA Institute of Physics has been nominated for the Klokhuis Science Award. Last year, Corentin Coulais made it to the final of this award organized by the popular Dutch children's tv show "Het Klokhuis". This year, Mazi Jalaal and his team have been nominated for their research on the Marangoni effect - displayed for example by tiny robot boats that the team designed, and that can race over a water surface using alcohol as their fuel. The image above - a still of a short video that Klokhuis will use - shows Vera Horjus, one of the team members, studying these tiny racers.

The research project is one of ten that were nominated for the award. Two other teams involving UvA researchers were also nominated. The team of Milica Nikolic (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences) was nominated for their research on how smiling and blushing can help us make new friends; the team of Marja Lamoree that includes Gert-Jan Gruter (Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences) was nominated for the project "Plastic of the future is made of sugar".

The ultimate winner of the award will be featured in a special Klokhuis episode later this year. If you want to increase one of teams’ chances to win, you can vote for your favourite via the link below. This video has short introduction to all different nominated projects: