Kees Wesselink - Schram

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?