Kees Wesselink - Schram

The 2026 World Cup album has 980 spaces. A packet holds seven stickers. So 140 packets should do the job. Then you are fifty packets in, the album is half empty, and you keep opening players you already have. Why does a 980-sticker album swallow so many packets? We put it to UT mathematician Clara Stegehuis, who studies how randomness behaves in large networks.

Anyone watching the World Cup will see it happen in every match. Around the 23rd minute, the referee stops play, and the players reach for their water bottles. Twice per match, even late at night and even in an air-conditioned stadium. Why is that necessary? The answer says less about football than about how heavily heat strains the body.

Around 44 million Europeans have a tattoo, and the method has barely changed in centuries. A needle punctures the skin over and over to leave ink behind. It hurts, and it damages the skin. In this Kees Study I find out if I can tattoo without a needle?

Electric bikes have made cycling easier. You are still outside. Your legs are still moving. But how healthy is riding an e-bike really? The answer is more nuanced than you might think.

Place a dry sheet of paper in water and the moisture will slowly creep upward on its own. The same thing happens in walls and trees. In tiny channels, water can rise against gravity due to the attraction between water molecules and the walls of those channels. Once a channel is filled, it is still possible to move the liquid around. You can do this with pressure, of course, but also with electricity. This process is called electro-osmosis: using electricity to drive the flow of water.

Imagine your hand moving without you telling it to. Not because you flinched, but because an electrical signal in your brain gave the command. That's what happens in Parkinson's disease. At the same time, electricity on the brain can also help to reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. That's exactly what researchers at the Brain Stimulation Lab of the University of Twente are trying to understand.

You doom scroll past another wildfire. A melting glacier. You might feel dread, or maybe a hollow kind of sadness. You close the tab, because what can you actually do about it? If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Just like sea levels and temperatures, levels of eco-anxiety are rising globally. This feeling, uncomfortable as it is, might be exactly where meaningful action begins.

Life-support machines can save your life. But sometimes they can make patients sicker. When doctors use an artificial lung to keep someone alive, the kidneys often also fail. Up to 70% of patients on this treatment develop kidney problems. Could both be solved with the same device?

Your skin bends and stretches all day long. When you grab a doorhandle or laugh, your skin follows effortlessly. Your skin has to deform, be stretched, pulled or pressed, and still return to its original shape. In this story, UT researcher Fay Claybrook explains how she is attempting to replicate these properties in artificial skin.

What happens when a tear suddenly develops in your coronary artery? Do you need immediate surgery, or is medication enough? It’s a crucial and complex decision. In this video, technical physician Lennart van de Velde shows how a digital copy of your aorta helps doctors to choose the most appropirate treatment.

If you think about becoming an engineer, doctor, designer or mechanic, there’s always that tiny voice asking: “But what if a robot takes my place?” It’s a question a lot of people wonder about, especially now that videos of ultra-smart machines pop up on your feed every day. So, will robots replace us, or will we work side by side?

When you think about the Olympic Games, you probably think about medals and world records. Thousands of athletes travel from all over the world. They live and train close to each other. In earlier Olympic Games, that raised a serious question: what if flu or COVID spreads quickly in the Olympic Village?

Ice skating at speeds exceeding 50 kilometres per hour. How do olympians achieve that top speed on the ice? The push-off is crucial, of course, but did you know that at Olympic speeds, approximately 80 per cent of the opposing force is air resistance? In this episode of Kees Study, I dive into the wind tunnel to discover how aerodynamics can make the difference between silver and gold.

Olympic speed skaters glide effortlessly over the ice. Figure skaters spin as if friction barely exists. Ice skating looks effortless, but for physicists, that is deeply strange. In fact, ice skating should not work at all.

No whining, just perform. For many athletes, that's a lesson they learn early on at their sports club. Standards like that travel with them, from youth teams to the Olympic podium. But they also have a downside: an increased risk of physical, psychological and sexual misconduct. The Winter Games show a glorious result. But how safe is the road to get there?

You raise an eyebrow and a cartoon crown pops onto your head. You hold up to fingers, and suddenly: flames! Snapchat filters might feel like magic, but they’re not. Behind every funny mask and smooth skin effect is a computer that has learned to ‘see’. At the University of Twente, student learn to do this themselves. Creative engineering!

Taking a biopsy while a patient is lying in an MRI scanner is extremely complicated. It requires extreme precision. Most robots cannot operate near an MRI scanner. In this new episode of Kees Study, I discover how medical robotics makes this possible, with a robot specially designed for MRI-guided breast biopsy.

Every recipe website seems convinced that you simply cannot make banana bread without first reliving someone’s traumatic childhood memory. But I’m not here to get sentimental about a fake sob story. I’m using a recipe format for a very simple reason: at the University of Twente, we “bake” mini-hearts in the lab. They squish, they jiggle, they contract. And the steps to make them read surprisingly like a cookbook minus the calories, plus some stem cells and all the fun.

Imagine: it’s Secret Santa night. You nervously tap on your phone and ask ChatGPT to whip up a quick poem. The result is… um, well… not exactly gift-worthy. Why are AI models such as ChatGPT often unable to rhyme properly? Thijs van Ede, AI researcher at the University of Twente, knows why and explains AI and rhyming.

Imagine you are sitting in a self-driving car. Suddenly, someone runs across the street. In a fraction of a second, the car decides to brake. How does it do that so quickly? And could it do so even faster or with less energy, especially now that self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles rely heavily on cameras, smart sensors and AI systems?

Running is wonderful. Until an injury, such as a painful Achilles tendon, sidelines you. After struggling with an injury to my Achilles tendon, I want to know: how can I prevent future running injuries, and how can technology help? For my new Kees Study, I’m diving into the world of biomedical engineering and its connection to running.

The Netherlands has exceptionally clean tap water. Drinking water companies purify it with modern technologies such as membranes and check the quality continuously. Yet some TikTok influencers try to scare you off and try to sell you a home water filter. Experts such as UT professor Wiebe de Vos warn that home filters are unnecessary. Here are five reasons why a home water filter in the Netherlands is mostly unnecessary and sometimes detrimental.

The suit of the fictional superhero Iron Man grants engineer Tony Stark superhuman strength, flight and other superhero abilities. Engineers from Twente figured out how to build a team of Iron Men, by coating sperm cells with iron nanoparticles. Suddenly, they can be steered like robots.

In Spain, the lights went out for millions of people. Not because of a cyber attack, but because of... sunlight. Researchers at the University of Twente see this as a lesson in systems thinking: sustainable solutions require smart direction. And that involves more maths than you might expect.

It is well known that artificial intelligence can beat the best players in board games, but did you know that UT is using the same techniques to make logistics more efficient? So your groceries are delivered smarter while ASML saves millions.

At sunrise, deep in Ghana’s tropical forest, a camera 40 metres above ground wakes up. It captures a treetop bursting into bloom, or not... A small detail in a vast green landscape, but one that holds a crucial clue to understanding how our climate is changing.

The energy transition requires action. Not just from policymakers or engineers, but precisely from the people who have to do it: the installation engineers, work planners and technicians. They are the key to change. But how do you give them space to learn the necessary skills as well as to innovate?

Every once in a while, in a quiet corner of the TechMed Centre of the University of Twente, anonymous employees roll up their sleeves and donate a small tube of blood. Not to save a life today, but to provide real human blood for scientific research.

What happens when you let someone with no experience drive a rolling machine? In this episode of Kees Study, Kees explores how people learn new skills with technology.

What if preparing for climate change could be as simple as playing a game? Cities everywhere are dealing with flooding, but not everyone knows what they can do to help. Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS), like rain barrels and green roofs, could make a huge difference. But how do you educate people about them? My name is Kees, and I am participating in experiments to learn more about the research at the University of Twente. In this Kees Study, I participated in the research of Dr. Carissa Champlin from the Urban and Regional Planning department at ITC.

Did you know that in winter, solar panels produce only 10% of their summer output? In a country like the Netherlands, where we lead the world with 3.5 solar panels per person, this seasonal drop is a major challenge. Why do solar panels produce so little energy in winter? And what can we do about it?

The Netherlands has been fighting a battle against water for centuries. This symbolism of water as the enemy was popular among 20th-century engineers. In the 21st century, there is more focus on natural processes, and we speak of water management instead. But what will the Dutch water landscape look like in another century?