The Power of Stand-Up Talks: TEDxTartu

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Triin Mahlakõiv
Triin Mahlakõiv in action: Putting up TEDxTartu posters.

Triin in action: Putting up TEDxTartu posters. Photo from personal archive.

Triin Mahlakõiv is a fresh graduate of the master’s programme in communication management at the University of Tartu and a co-organiser of the TEDxTartu conference on 10 November 2012.

TEDxTartu isn’t just one day of interesting talks and elevating entertainment – it’s an event devoted to positive change. The contagious TEDxTartu talks invited listeners to step outside the conventional frames.

Free-falling

After a musical prologue by five mad folks from the Kriminaalne Elevant band, Peeter Mõtsküla, a parachute instructor, shared his experiences of parachuting and explained how the mind tends to work during the jump.

He declared boldly,”I do this because it’s beautiful – breathtakingly beautiful.” But beauty is not the only argument or explanation for parachuting. According to Mõtsküla, at first there must be curiosity, a stepping out of one’s own shadow, then the desire to take one step further and then another. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, Events, Tartu | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

4 Good Reasons for You to Visit Narva

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Inga Külmoja

Narva, a town on Estonia’s northeastern frontier, is also home to our Narva College. For many of the town’s 64,000 inhabitants, the festive opening of the college’s new and long-awaited building on the Town Hall Square tonight is a huge event to celebrate and remember.

While you may think of Narva as another boring provincial town, there is actually much more hidden in it. Narva is a different Estonia – and here is why.

University of Tartu Narva college and Narva Town Hall

The new building of Narva College has an unusual beak-shaped roof and stands next to the Town Hall. Photo by Andres Tennus.

1. View, feel and taste Russia

If you haven’t been to Russia, or have only visited Moscow or St. Petersburg and would like to experience more, head to Narva. With 82 percent of its population ethnically Russian and just under four percent Estonian, Narva is pretty much a Russian town. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, Events, General | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4 Good Reasons for You to Visit Narva

The Estonian Atheist Experiment

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Martin Noorkõiv

Martin A. Noorkõiv is the CEO of Domus Dorpatensis Foundation. He is one of the founders of Estonian Civil Society Week, TEDxTartu conferences and the Young Leaders programme. Martin studies economics at the University of Tartu.

Martin Noorkõiv

Speaking at the TEDGlobal 2012 TEDx pre-conference in Edinburgh. Photo by TED/Creative Commons.

For the majority of my life I’ve lived in Estonia, the most atheistic country in the world (Only 14% of Estonians gave a positive answer to the question: “Is religion an important part of your daily life?”), and I’ve been proud of that. I’ve even thought of myself as a “fighting atheist”, listening to Richard Dawkins with great admiration, ready to prove any religious person wrong.

Yet during the past three years this worldview of mine has been quietly, but very steadily deteriorating.

With this article I’m offering a theory, some of it based on fact (psychology mostly) and some, well, on hunches. It’s open to discussion and change, and I do not claim to be an expert on this topic – these are just my observations. I believe Estonia is on the forefront of the biggest religious shift in history. This is where the future of human society and the role of religion will be determined. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, General | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Happy Icy Tartu

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Kaija Pook

Tartu's Kissing Students in iceThis is a visual story about the colours of life in Tartu before darkness invaded the town, wrapping the Kissing Students in cold, spectacular ice.

Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, Events, Student life, Tartu | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Happy Icy Tartu

Need for Sleep Is Inherited

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Piret Pappel

The need for sleep is really variable from person to person. Albert Einstein needed eleven hours to rest. Napoleon, on the other hand, was allegedly satisfied with four; the same is told of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The season of the year, along with age and sex, all play part in how much you need to sleep. The pattern of circadian activity – chronotype – is also important. You may be an early bird who wakes up and goes to sleep early or an “owl” who likes to stay awake late at night and sleep long in the morning.

Research with identical twins revealed that about 40 per cent of the need for sleep boils down to heredity. The role of genes is becoming ever clearer. A major international study figured out the first gene variant that is an important factor in sleep requirements.

Tartu Autumn Days 2012

Getting up early in the morning can be tough, but seemingly not for these guys – they have come out at 6.15am this Monday to get the Tartu Student Days going with the ‘wake-up call’ exercise. Photo by Erki-Heiki Meerits.

Till Roennberg from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich led the work group that analysed gene samples of more than four thousand persons from seven European countries. A little more than a thousand samples by donors of the Estonian Genome Project were also included. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Medical sciences, Research | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Need for Sleep Is Inherited

UT Student Blogger Contest: 5 Best Stories

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Inga Külmoja

Our international students submitted 35 stories to the UT Student Blogger Contest. Here are the five finalists and their best stories, as chosen by the jury. The winner will be chosen in a public vote on UT Facebook page this week, and will become the host of the UT Student Blog for one’s study period in Tartu.

The stories are presented in no particular order.

What Irina Saw Out the Window and The Marginality Manifesto
(By Irina Sadovina)

This day in Tartu, like many others, starts and ends at Ruunipizza. Apart from offering heavenly pancakes with honey and nuts, this is, strangely enough, the only place in the whole city where I can actually get studying done. Over time I have turned into the person who hovers outside the door ten minutes before the café opens, anxiously looking in. I don’t know what the baristas think about me. I never ventured beyond a few phrases in heavily accented Estonian, and even though every one of them obviously speaks English, it seems awkward switching to English now. Our lives are already too intimately intertwined, since we see each other every day; I am afraid of additional awkwardness, so I never talk.

Oh, but awkwardness, as you may imagine, seeps in anyway, leaps up from around the corners often and unexpectedly, and gets me embarrassed, horrified and secretly overjoyed. Because I love awkwardness, actually, so most of the time it’s my own fault anyway. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, Events, Student life, Tartu | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on UT Student Blogger Contest: 5 Best Stories

Estonia Is a Paradise for Mushrooms

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Villu Päärt
mushroom

A mushroom growing in Estonian forest. Image credit: Toomas Tuul.

In the mushroom kingdom, rules are quite different than in the world of plants and animals. The closer to the Equator, the more animal species are outnumbered by plant species; however, it is not in the tropical rainforests where one can find the greatest variety of mushrooms.

In fact, the number of mushroom species is quite meagre in the tropics. Mycologists from the University of Tartu have come to this conclusion after analysing the variety of ectomycorrhizal mushrooms in various regions of the world. These include every kind of popular edible mushroom, i.e., milk mushrooms and boletus.

Ectomycorrhiza is a coat-like cover that mushrooms entwine over the root tops of trees. Mushrooms decompose organic waste matter and make it easier for trees to obtain minerals from the earth. In exchange, trees provide sugars for the mushrooms – something the latter cannot produce on their own as they lack the power of photosynthesis.

For distinguishing separate mushroom species, mycologists look at a special region in mushrooms’ DNA that is variable enough. “It’s like every mushroom species has its own bar code”, says Leho Tedersoo, a researcher at the Botanical and Mycological Museum of the University of Tartu. He was the primary author of the relevant article that was  published in Molecular Ecology journal. Continue reading →

Share
Tweet
Share
0 Shares
Posted in Estonia, Natural and exact sciences, Research | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments