technology – Schoemann

16/01/202615/01/2026

Social time

What does the „social“ have to do with time. Well, time is a perfect case of a social construction or a fundamentally social construct. The definition of time as „Greenish mean time“ is nothing but a useful socio-political statement to synchronize time across the world, or previously an imperium. Points in time, as shown on a clock(s), can be helpful to synchronize human behavior. We might want to show up on the same point in time to start or end work. Of course there are thousands of ways in which such synchronization might go awfully wrong. This makes for splendid drama and movies have a long history to capture our attention on this matter. Social expectations, a social, psychological, and even a biological concept in extreme cases (Pavlov effect) make many of us to get a bit itchy, if time is getting short to meet other persons or an expected event is going to happen. A lot of social pressure is transmitted through the ticking away of time. The mechanism to internalize social patterns (for example prayer), via time and the clock, is quite powerful and has been used in movies throughout the history of the cinema. Even the individual endpoint in time is in almost all cases a shared social experience and turns into a kind of socially relevant time. (Take your time to watch The Clock by Christian Marclay).

11/01/202613/01/2026

Time – The Clock

Time keeps puzzling us. The 24 hours of concatenated clips from well-known cinema films are a bit overwhelming or even lengthy. However, this spurs lots of time to reflect on time, on a kind of meta level. We see the clock or clocks ticking in all sorts of situations and environments. Nearly all emotional states can be interpreted relative to a time stamp provided by a clock. Christian Marclay’s oeuvre is screened at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at a time when we feel multiple clocks ticking at the same time. For the sociologist, there is time on the macro-societal level, like overall socioeconomic development, but also individual time. A single person or a single moment in time may have very different macro-social implications. The possibility to live through the cineastic interpretations of ten to, as opposed to, ten past the hour, are interpreted by us with very different meanings. In a longer or historical sense, the timing of time does not matter that much. Point in time or time as duration, that is the question. Art in cinema can play with this like rock around The Clock. Don’t ask me how much time I spent watching, thinking and feeling through time in this movie exhibition, Should we always measure time with a clock. Want it or not, we measured by our smartphones all the time and on multiple timelines.

07/01/202606/01/2026

Metabolic harm

At the beginning of the 21st century the lack of physical activity for large parts of society has become a major risk of and cause of metabolic harm. We have become used to a sedentary lifestyle and the digital access to distractions and information have encouraged further immobility. Alex Broom et al. (2025) stress the importance to include social and governmental interventions into the many existing medical, pharmacological and technological interventions. The authors advocate a rather holistic approach to really make a difference. The obesity trends cause metabolic harm of an unprecedented size. We have to rethink mobility patterns and other behavioral changes into our daily routines to bring back more stimulation to our metabolic system.

06/01/202605/01/2026

Rotational energy

We all know rotational energy from our bicycles. lighting used to come from a small rotational energy source attached to a wheel (dynamo light) which produced sufficient electricity to lighten a front and back light. The use of rotational energy, however, is much older than the application on the bicycles, which have been largely replaced by batteries and LED-lights. The first so-called Post-mills stem from Normandy as well as the Rhine riversides around 1200. It took about 800 years to make a splendid comeback as energy source in the age of the „All electric society“ of the 21st century in the making. The „Deutsche Museum of Technology“ in Berlin has great examples of such rotational energy sources on display in the museum‘s park. You can walk a path through the past and future of rotational energy sources.

05/01/202604/01/2026

Utopian Mobility

From time to time we have to reconsider our investments in mobility infrastructure. What seemed to make sense in the 50s,60s or 70s often makes no sense 60 years later. Highways, which separate city districts like walls belong to rather utopian visions about City life and mobility, progress and living conditions. These utopian individualized mobility solutions don’t seem to serve us as well as we believed, or were made to believe, more than half a century ago. Empty highways midday at the turn of 2025/26 tell their own story about liabilities from the past and outdated ideas of technical and social progress. Sharing solutions have become very popular and the younger generations adopt already different mobility patterns than older generations. Each generation adheres to its own more or less utopian mobility model, adjustments are likely to be made accordingly.

01/01/202631/12/2025

Saint-Simon Utopia

Towards the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century, the early signs of what the industrial revolution would mean for the working people became visible. Saint-Simon had lived through the ups and downs of the French revolution himself and had been to the Americas with La Fayette before he developed his utopian socialist vision of a unified class of working people, which for him included blue as well as white collar workers. At the advent of the 2nd industrial revolution through general and agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2025, we shall most likely witness a renewed interest in utopian scenarios and grand ideas of what the future of technology, society and humanity might be like. In 2026 we shall re-read Saint-Simon quite a bit in order to learn about ways to make sense of arising trends and how to come up with a positive utopia that can motivate people to thrive again for more equality within and between societies.

29/12/202528/12/2025

Future of work

The beginning of the 3rd millennium has brought about several fundamental changes of work and employment. What had previously been thought of as utopian in the realm of work, has become a normal feature of work. Just like in the historically grounded, utopian perspective described by Bernard Gazier “Tous sublimes” (2003) we have a growing group of employees and self-employed persons who enjoy privileged positions on the labor market with sufficiently high salaries and access to mobility on the labor market at their own discretion. In addition to these examples described in Gazier’s utopian perspective, the 2020s added permission of remote work from anywhere and use of AI-assisted technology and robotics. A previously utopian view of the future of work has become a reality for many more people nowadays. The utopian element no longer is the how this world of work might look like, but how many people will enjoy the benefits of the technological progress. With a substantial increase of the efficiency and productivity of work, the distribution and sharing of the fruits shall become even more important. We have entered into a new phase of “the brave new world” of work as of 2025. (Image: Graffiti Berlin 2025-12).

05/12/202503/12/2025

Digital Environment

We get accustomed to our digital environment through the routine use of applications without even thinking about it. Over years of just using only one browser or office package, we forgot to make conscious choices in companies and our private computers. However, digital sovereignty asks us to take back our control of these computer systems before they take control of us. The AI-boom will make a lot of things easier for us, without knowing much about the technology behind them. Just talking to your smartphone you will be able to achieve many tasks or searches without many of the other steps that were necessary before. The knowledge to command a typewriter or keyboard will be more and more obsolete unless you really need to change something profound on your computer, like the operating system or an expensive office program. Keep exercising yourself with alternative and new software and you’ll stay the master of your digital environment.

04/12/202502/12/2025

Installation Guide Linux

Use the info available in various help forums, maybe videos.
Optional: Check size of your hard disc for backup.
Why not renew your backup on an external drive or USB-stick now?
Test your system loading interruption key combination.
Upon RESTART on most systems you use press Power-up key, follwed by either ESC or DEL or F1, F2, F10, F11 key, while power-up runs to load your BIOS.
Have an empty! USB sticks (4 GB+) ready.
Download the for example the latest Linux Mint 22.2 on it (and flash it using etcher on USB from hard drive, if downloaded to hard disk).
Power-up computer with loading system from USB-key not hard drive. (Select option!)
Remember it has English keyboard as default when you connect your WLAN.
Basics are ready!
Keep starting from USB or after some further tests of components install Linux to the hard disk and say goodbye to a slow and costly Windows and Office packages.
Donate to whoever supported you. Perhaps your local repair shop.
Spread the word and help others.

02/12/202501/12/2025

VLOPs flopped

Well, not quite. This is wishful thinking. Let’s start slowly. Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), the platforms we all use on our smartphones, are subject to the European Digital Services Act (DSA). As of the year of its adoption in 2022 by the European Parliament, the European Union has a mandate to act, for example, against fraudulent websites that attempt to steel money from customers with fake content on VLOPs and, of course, on smaller platforms as well. To put it bluntly, the European Union has to defend its population from mainly American VLOPs massively exploited by Russian criminals to impinge on our European digital sovereignty. These external threats have to be taken very seriously as they touch upon the satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the European democratic political system and trust-based societies. The level of trust in Europe, particularly with respect to “Personal data used for legitimate purposes” is high in the Nordic countries and Ireland, but much lower in the UK, most Eastern, Central and Southern European countries. (Data retrieval from OECD on 2025-12-1, compare figure below, figure build Link).
VLOPs might be important drivers of eroding trust not only in data security, but also how democratic institutions are able to protect its citizens, youth and children. About time to act accordingly.

29/11/202528/11/2025

Socio-technological obsolescence

The standard literature or AI-sytems will give you a definition of on technological obsolescence, which specifies that obsolescence does not mean that a device is broken, but that it is outdated. In computers this might be due to hardware no longer supporting newer, more resource demanding software, or newer software insisting on the use of other hardware. The seemingly rapid innovation cycles in smartphones, cars or robots might justify such technological obsolescence, but the real advances like shifts from 3G to 4G to the newer 5G mobile frequency standards have taken place rather slowly due to provider coverage of sufficiently large, particularly rural areas.
Therefore, the technological obsolescence has to be enlarged as a concept to socio-technological obsolescence as the societal, legal and economic boundaries of technological innovations have to be taken into account as well. Provisions for health concerns or CO2 saving circularity, i.e. reuse of resources have to be taken into account as part of a precautionary principle.
Computer screens have asked us to move from square designs to wide screens (watch videos) to smartphones’ standards of long formats. My 20 years old square screen has been doing a reasonable job throughout these periods, though not for serious games.
The socio-technological obsolescence relies on a “socio-technical prestige score” of products, like for luxury brands in other industries, where fashions drive obsolescence more than technology.
(Image: Robotic arm made by Kuka writes on paper sheet at Frankfurt book fair 2017)

28/11/202527/11/2025

Shift to Linux

We have become rather lazy and sometimes even ignorant when it comes to what kind of operating system we use on our computers. The phasing out of security support for Windows 10 based computers creates worldwide a huge pile of computers that cannot update to 11 due to limited hardware 4Gb of active memory only. However, for many simple tasks these computers work perfectly fine. Browsing through the internet or just drafting texts or spreadsheets doesn’t ask for larger sizes of memory. Most AI applications run on the web and not locally on your computer. No need to throw away these devices and spend, spend, spend on the latest technology. It takes a bit of time and effort to read through the guides for such a shift. Maybe you need to come back several times between documentation and a bit of trial and error, but the learning of digital skills is always a rewarding experience as well. My fanless computer will serve me for many more years as a quiet companion in drafting blog entries and research. Additionally, it is a step towards digital sovereignty so many people talk about these days. (Image: Computer Screen with Linux cinnamon 2.2 and Libre Office in background).

27/11/202526/11/2025

Deep Fake Threat

Our Western democracies are aware that “deep fake videos”, radio, online-newspapers and most of all social media platforms are all around us already. However, more scientific voices alert us that this threat to our easy or comfortable way of life to consume information eventually threatens the survival of our democracies. Previously, interference in elections used to focus on rigged election procedures, but in the 21^st century powerful other alternatives can do the dirty job to bias elections against the original intentions of the electorate. The widespread use of AI will exacerbate the already practiced ways to produce deep fakes. In a preparatory self-test of an AI-assisted chatbot I was surprised myself of the quality of the output. A person not very familiar with my original voice in a second language would assume that it is me who is being interviewed in person. Based on a fake news text, any form will be automatically translated into voice only and/or video based on basic visuals.
Statisticians used to joke some decades ago: “Don’t believe in any statistics, unless you faked it yourself.” This is meant to encourage people to be aware of dangers of the use of statistics to influence opinions or official decision-making, like in policy making of central banks, which might be based on biased accounting for shrinkflation, cheatflation or greedflation to name just a few,
Hence, the need to strengthen awareness, analytical skills and critical thinking should be high on the agenda to defend our democracies. There are not only external military threats, but additional ones masked as internal threats.
(Image:: mice as humans in living room 2 couch potatos 1 on rocking chair, tea time)

25/11/202525/11/2025

Robotics Hype 2026

Towards the end of 2025, it is common practice to look back on the last 12 months to summarize a year and to contribute to the “collective memory” of the year. From a “society and technology” perspective we shall not be surprised if such summaries will be full of images and praise of AI and robotics. However, large parts of the innovations that shall be declared to have marked 2025 were already around 10 years ago. It is just the timing for the new momentum and the creation of a hype around these technologies that is really remarkable (compare WSJ 2025-11-24 p 1-2 by Konrad Putzier).
It is true, playing around with robotics was reserved to universities, research institutes and some big players in industry. The public and financial markets showed little interest in these “nerdy” fields of applications. Although we were hardly able to compete with our chess computers, Watson solving math problems for us including the steps for us to follow. Video, image and textual support was provided by specialized applications already at high levels and in multilingual versions. In 2025 these techniques have enhanced with machine learning and neural network programming reaching higher speed and being able to use ever larger data sets as input.
But there are areas where the hype is coming to an end. How about all the artificial reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) applications? Many have seized to exist. Have you visited or invested in “Second Life” platforms? Opened a shop in the VR-world? Bitcoins have lost 7% of their value between 1.1.2025 and 24.11.2025 and they suffer still from high volatility rather than an uninterrupted rise.
War has fuelled the rise of shares in 2025 and “dual-use” technology benefits as well. AI has been driven by, and drives both trends.
In sum, it is much less the technological innovations in 2025 that are astonishing, but the political economy of how to orchestrate a sensational hype around the technologies.
(Image Hannover Industry Fair 2016-3-14).

24/11/202523/11/2025

Sovereign data spaces

Data is the new gold, petrol or diamonds. In order to bring this message home to all people in the EU, the European summit on digital sovereignty had a small exhibition of projects that address these issues. City data spaces is such an initiative which has been running for quite some time now. In fact, from a city planner and data scientist perspective cities collect already huge amounts of data and can offer them to service providers, businesses and each and every one of us to organize our energy consumption, improve mobility patterns or any form of data or video streaming services. The amount of data captured and to be stored is growing rapidly. Just think of the Internet of things (IoT), maybe that’s only your wifi-connected coffee machine, oven or heating. Now add AI to this which allows the system to learn about your daily patterns to start the device in time for you to focus on other tasks. As we would like these data to stay confidential, the need for European digital sovereignty becomes sufficiently clear. It will take a huge effort to provide an adequate digital infrastructure for this “brave new world” and many people to work towards this objective. Train the trainers already, cause otherwise this is going to take ages before we can harvest the benefits in safe and sovereign manner.

23/11/202523/11/2025

Failure time

In mechanical as well as medical components it is interesting to know about the usually hidden failure time of a product. The failure time simply means probability the component will seize to function properly or altogether. Usually, this probability of failure increases with the duration and the intensity of use. We might know this from cars or heating systems, but airplanes and heart valves obey the aame basic statistical models. Programmed failure time is a nuisance, which works against all efforts of sustainability, Over-engineered products would work much longer than the actual use case. Locomotives with steam engines that still function well even today might serve as an example of the latter case. The issue becomes a bit more complex if we consider not only the product but each single component. Maximizing profits often leads to taking risks with failure times or failure rates over a fixed time (a more general term than the guaranteed lifetime of a product). This sounds rather abstract thinking, but in modern military equipment the consideration of failure time, self-destruction or destruction by enemy play an important role again. Failure time of military equipment has moved to the forefront of issues of equipment and is part of strategic planning, like it or not.

19/11/202518/11/2025

EU Digital Sovereignty

If we try to search for digital solutions, we shall encounter a whole lot of American and Chinese products, but very few European companies that are able or willing to compete. Hardware mainly comes from China, software from the US, at least until AI was not working in the background. If we add Russian interference to destabilize our digital infrastructure to the scenario, we are not really fit for the challenges of the 21st century. The very definition of a country or political union is the affirmation and competence to assure its sovereignty, particularly in cases of territorial conflicts with neighboring countries. My health or mobility data are a rather private affair, however, our state governments in EU-Europe have done little to ensure our data integrity. Business is also at a loss, if they do not spend heavily on data security themselves, usually relying on external cooperation.

The EU digital sovereignty summit took place in Berlin on the EUREF campus in 2025. It can only constitute a beginning for intensified cooperation in this long overlooked policy area. It will be tough to catch up where production has been abandoned for decades.

15/11/202514/11/2025

Memory design

The progress in the field of genetic editing and design is astonishing. The research group of Johannes Graeff tested the “behavioral consequences of epigenetically editing the Arc promoter within engram cells”. Plasticity is a key feature of memory formation and the experimental evidence shows that this plasticity can also be interrupted. Moreover, the scientists were able to demonstrate a reversibility of retention or un unlearning of manifestations in memory of mice. The bidirectional reversibility of memory expression has potentially therapeutic value for traumatized humans eventually. However, if memory becomes part of a design feature of human species, the risks involved are just as important as the potentials. In totalitarian political systems techniques of “memory design” might be able to adapt such influences on memory, which used to be called brainwashing. Ethics commissions could get ready already to define safeguarding of human memory. (Image: The fountain of Bacchus, Museum of Paris, 18th century wine merchant entry)

12/11/202511/11/2025

Typewriter history

The history of the typewriter and typewriter is comparatively short compared to the history of literature or other technologies as partners in the creative process. With the advent of AI (here as part of infografix, see image below) the skills of using and mastering a typewriter have become almost obsolete. The original design by Remington (timeline below) has dominated for almost 100 years the technology of typewriters. Then came the electronic IBM technique with an automated correction type, which was not only faster, but also more forgiving of “typos”, short for typing errors.
The craft of handwriting had suffered a tough blow, despite its almost intimate touch to it. Knowing the typewriter outline by heart allowed typing with closed eyes or a focus on another text or image as well as a parallel thought process. Scientists and writers (Claude Levi-Strauss) reported on their creative process as intrinsically being linked to their typewriter.
QWERTY outlines for English language typewriters still dominate the keyboard typing today. With the AI interaction on the rise, we might move away from typing as a “Kulturtechnik” a technology of our cultural era and focus more on human-machine interactions via our voice and microphones. The underlying question, however, remains the same: What is the best technology to enhance our thought process? This, in fact, tends to be a very personal human choice, where technology plays only a subsidiary role.

11/11/202510/11/2025

From AI to xAI

As humans, we like the feeling to be in control of things. This applies even to immaterial things like religious beliefs. Generative AI has created problems with its hidden structures and lack of transparency of their applications of algorithms (and combinations of algorithms) to basic data bases of knowledge and information. The use of xAI, which stands for explainable artificial intelligence, can address some of the concerns about the lack of transparency and explanation of responses from AI systems. Many users want to know in advance about the consequences of the use of specific words or notions in an instruction to AI. The interpretation of each single word by xAI can inform about the precision of interpretation (cheap versus cheapest, for example) or highlight the sensitivity to gender-neutral language or not in its guidelines. Additionally, ex post the xAI could indicate alternative notions in a prompt and, briefly, how this would affect results.
Yes, there is a trade-off between brevity of answer and room for explanations. As in psychology, there some value in a “thinking aloud” procedure for respondents in order to better understand (implicit) the reasoning behind a reply. xAI takes us a step further in this direction of asking AI to think aloud or more explicitly in a human compatible way of logic and broader reasoning.
Put AI on the psychotherapist’s bench and xAI will be to the advantage of many more humans again. Humans just don’t like black box systems that lack the necessary as well as sufficient transparency. (Image on the right: Patrick Jouin, chaise solide C2, MAD digital humanism).

09/11/202508/11/2025

Dynamic Equilibrium

The notion of a dynamic equilibrium is applied in several scientific disciplines. The search of the world wide web takes us first to the application in chemistry. The dynamic equilibrium denotes the state when reactants and products are continuously converted. Fascinating as a process, there are videos where you can watch the process evolve. Applications in economic or social theory are also common even if the time scales to observe such processes of dynamic equilibrium usually take longer to evolve than in chemistry of bubbles. In physics we ponder about dynamic equilibria in Newton’s view of gravitational forces between planets and the celestial system. With a more down to earth approach we might just admire the dynamic equilibrium of an artist on a rope, before we dive into the complex challenges of the new balance of power in international politics of the multipolar world.

08/11/202507/11/2025

Telework Challenge

There is a seminal trend that many employees prefer to have a choice to work on the premises of the employer or remote from home. This flexibility has become a major element of collective bargaining on work and time in larger companies in order to clarify rights and obligations.
In France it is about 1 in 5 of employees who do telework one day per month (1 in 6 in Nouvelle Aquitaine). The higher up in the hierarchy a person is, the more likely s/he is to do telework. Higher levels of educational attainment and seniority in a company also improve the access to and use of telework. There are still many employees who would like to do telework in their jobs, which technically could be done remotely, but who cannot do it (1 in 3). Most of those are denied the possibility by their employers.
Data from a survey in Germany from 2014 showed that before Covid-19 men were worked more often remotely than did women (Lott & Abendroth, 2019). The latest figures from France 2024 show that women have overtaken men as remote workers (Askenazy et al. 2025). As working from home has become more a part of the “standard employment relationship” today, the fears of loosing out on career opportunities due working from home seems to play less of a role nowadays, probably for both gender. Compared to 2014 the costs of equipment and availability and ease of installation of fast internet have become more affordable and might push the spread of telework even further.
The data from France show a strong positive correlation of remote work and commuting distance to work. Hence, long commuting distances “drive” more people into telework, which makes a lot of ecological sense, too.

07/11/202506/11/2025

Cut it short

The “Revue des sciences humaines” (Demanze and Gleizes, Nr. 355, 2024 pp. 7-16) provides an interesting reflection on the widespread practice to find (new) ways to cut long stories or insights short. Short by itself, this introduction to a longer special issue on the topic “Faire court” stresses 4 elements of the contemporary impetus to cut it short:
(1) The creative process may be subject to condensation of content, similar to the process of a “reduction” in the culinary vocabulary. The speed of creativity, inspiration, freedom of expression are exemplified by the twitterization of and aphorisms in literature. Roland Barthes, in his analysis of the “haiku”, raises awareness to the different associations of the short text forms in different societies.
(2) The observed shortening of time spans of attention and the competition and economy of attention have raised the stakes for longer formats and explain to a large extent the success of shorts in the digital age.
(3) The short format works to increase the intensity of the literary experience.
(4) In deconstructing the associations of long formats as “monumental” versus short formats as ephemeral, the “cut it short“ tendency serves to “demonumentalize” the big shots of literature, science and the humanities. Well, about time to cut it short, “hic et nunc”, here and now!

03/11/202501/11/2025

Home Wind energy noninvasive

The abundance of wind energy in some regions has made the use of this source of energy more popular. During long winter nights the harvest of wind energy is a wonderful source of free energy. Regulations and oversize wind turbines have tarnished the image of wind energy in some regions. However, even in France and not only in this small village of Asterix and Obelix who resist the Roman empire, that we can find tiny wind turbines providing small amounts of energy. For all those households that have a battery they can use this power whenever they may need it. Suddenly, we are looking forward to the stormy autumn season.

01/11/202529/10/2025

Polypharmacy issues

As we age, we become more likely to confront polypharmacy issues. Polypharmacy is defined as taking 5 or more medications per day. The study reported in The Lancet healthy longevity by Payne et al. 2025 had participants with a median of 4 health conditions and a median of 8 prescriptions. Even a comprehensive set up which involved several experts from medical doctors and pharmacists did not manage to achieve a significant improvement in polypharmacy outcomes in this experimental study with otherwise carefully matched intervention and control group. However, the mental health (measured in patients as “health-care-related quality of life”) slightly increased and the “treatment burden” experienced by patients was slightly reduced.
In combination with a previous study the probability of errors in nurses, who are the prime persons responsible for the administration of medications in institutionalized settings, the reduction of potentials for errors like they are to be found in polypharmacy should continue to be a prime target of this research in future. Together with the knowledge about the prevalence of functional illiteracy at older ages, polypharmacy remains a critical issue on the public health agenda beyond the experimental settings in this study.

27/10/202524/10/2025

All electric again

The “all electric society” has been identified by Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber (2025 p.48) as one of the underlying driving forces of “The real China Model”. Despite the heavy reliance and pollution caused by China’s use of coal, the large share of electricity (30%) of energy use is unmatched by the rest of the world except Japan. Investment in electricity grids and innovative ways of mobility around electricity will allow China to buzz rather than steam ahead. Solar cells, batteries for electricity storage and innovative ways of distribution of electricity through AI enhanced “learning” devices will widen the gap between China and other countries that suffer from inefficient path dependency.
Taking the advent of the “All electric society” seriously will free resources through the focus on future-proof technologies. We should not be afraid of the sparks of a short-circuited “All electric society”, the environmental challenges ahead for all of us, particularly China, ask to shift to high voltage solutions urgently.

17/10/202517/10/2025

AI as individualizer

In a one pager in the journal “Rolling Stone” (2025, p. 9) Bruno Patino writes about the legendary David Bowie who was the first rock musician to launch a new song on the internet before it became available as CD (Telling Lies, 1996). As a pioneer in co-creation, Bowie anticipated somehow the trend and wish of people to personalize preferred songs even further and distribute such versions among friends. In this process, AI has become a powerful tool to push individualization even further and the digital social media allow even broader audiences beyond a more narrow circle of friends. Music maybe setting the trend for some in the same field, other creative fields might follow the footsteps. The need to co-create collective experiences and participate in collective musical moments is likely to rise again as well.
Good news for music festivals across the world. Live concerts are the new form “collective individualism”.

11/10/202510/10/2025

Sponge Mofs

Many people might have come across “SpongeBob” as a TV-series. Well, in 2025 it is time for an update. The Nobel Committee has awarded the Chemistry prize not to SpongeBob, but the research linked to the sponge-like Mofs, i.e. metal-organic frameworks to Kitagawa, Robson, Yaghi. These Mofs have in fact properties similar to a sponge or cages in some applications. They consist of porous materials, which have large surface areas in relation to their apparent volume. Due to the modelling of network structures the surface of a grid can be expanded drastically.
Due to the application of such modelling techniques, the combinations of materials/organics and, thereby, the applications to modern technological challenges have increased tremendously. The exponential growth of research papers based on these foundations largely justify this honourable award. Not only the potential of carbon capture, but also the storage capacity of batteries as well as medical applications might benefit from this basic research and findings, eventually.
Playing around with a sponge, doing your dishes – also for men, or watching Spongebob might be considered differently from now on. Maybe, just start with a virtual visit of the Nobel museum for further inspiration.