Just for this one day, 23 April, we encourage you to avoid making grammar or spelling mistakes, and to just use words in their precise, etymological meanings (as writers of usage guides tell us to do). Just for a day, avoid splitting your infinitives, put 'only' only in its proper place in the sentence, say 'I shall' instead of I will, and for goodness sake, just for once avoid using 'literally' as a general intensifier.

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Remember your time in Leiden? Read about Leiden through the eyes of new international student Ximena León, student guide of group number 17 during the Orientation Week Leiden.

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For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star. The discovery reaffirms that the conditions that spawned the Earth and Sun are not unique in the Universe. The results are published in Nature.

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War and terrorism overshadow interest in the pre-Islamic heritage of the Arabic peninsula. The new Leiden Centre for the Study of Ancient Arabia aims to make the general public more aware of the ancient history of this region.

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Military leaders explore ‘the terrain’ for a possible mission and are supposed to inform political leaders at the right moment. Politicians make the decisions and, ideally, also determine the objectives. However, PhD student Mirjam Grandia concludes that in the preparation for the mission to Uruzgan, politicians failed to set any objectives and instead hopped on a train that was already in motion.

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