Amsterdam  - The value of Dutch insurer giant Aegon's shares fell slightly Thursday on the Amsterdam stock exchange following the publication of its third-quarter company results.

Aegon said it lost 329 million euros (428.92 million dollars) in the third quarter of 2008, below the 350 million euros which the company had announced to shareholders in late October.

By 11 am local time (1000 GMT), Aegon share value stood at 3.92 euros, a drop of 2 per cent.

Aegon said the loss came mainly from the ongoing drop in share value on the stock exchange and write-offs on investments.

Write-offs on the US banks Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, both of which collapsed earlier this fall, amounted to 336 million euros.

Amsterdam  - Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende congratulated Barack Obama on Wednesday with his victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections.

The Dutch prime minister sent a letter to the US president-elect, wishing him success.

In a statement released by the Dutch government communication service RVD, Balkenende further said "it was beautiful to see this election has moved millions of people, both in the US as well as abroad."

Referring, among others, to the global credit crisis, Balkenende said Obama's presidential term will be "challenging" and noted that the need for "intensive trans-Atlantic co-operation" was "never more urgent" than today.

Amsterdam, Nov 5: A team of researchers has found coral reefs growing at depths of six hundred to a thousand meters in the Atlantic Ocean.

Furu Mienis, a researcher from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), led the research team.

Mienis studied the development of carbonate mounds dominated by cold-water corals in the Atlantic Ocean at depths of six hundred to a thousand meters.

Amsterdam, Nov 5: A researcher has shown that that an alloy of the metals magnesium, titanium and nickel is excellent at absorbing hydrogen, and is sixty percent less than a battery pack, which brings the world a step closer to the everyday use of hydrogen as a source of fuel for powering vehicles.

The researcher in question is Robin Gremaud, who was sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

In order to find the best alloy, Gremaud developed a method that enabled simultaneous testing of thousands of samples of different metals for their capacity to absorb hydrogen, which led to the creation of the new alloy.

Hydrogen is considered to be a clean and therefore important fuel of the future.

Amsterdam  - A memorial sculpture was unveiled on Tuesday in the southern-Netherlands city of Riel to honour the "humanity" of a soldier from the German army during World War II.

The initiator of the memorial in Riel in the southern Netherlands, Herman van Rouwendaal, 76, said the sculpture "honours the humanity displayed by a soldier of the German army, or Wehrmacht, during WW II".

Karl Heintz Rosch was an 18-year-old soldier when he saved the lives of two young Dutch children on October 6, 1944.

Amsterdam, Nov 4 : Researchers working at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI has improved the entire process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting infrasound, which would help them detect events that have ‘inaudible’ sounds like illegal nuclear tests.

Sources of infrasound are often large and powerful, like meteors, explosions, ocean waves, storms, volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes and nuclear tests.

Infrasound is measured with arrays (series) of highly sensitive microbarometers.

TU Delft PhD student Laslo Evers, who works at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI, has now improved the entire process of measuring, analysing and interpreting infrasound.