The Afghanistan Mission Strains Body Like a Marathon

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Villu Päärt

Serving a 6-month mission in Afghanistan showed similar effects on Estonian soldiers’ health as running a marathon.

Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip explores a gun on his visit to the Estonian mission in Afghanistan. Image: Raigo Pajula / Scanpix

Researchers at the University of Tartu deemed the 65 soldiers heading to Afghanistan to be fit as a fiddle.

The soldiers were tested with electrocardiograph and echocardiograph scans, a cardiopulmonary stress test, a number of chemical blood analyses and also had their blood pressure and artery elasticity measured.

“Clinically, they were healthy – none had any heart or coronary diseases,” said Erik Salum, a doctoral student at the Heart Clinic of the University of Tartu and its Department of Biochemistry. Part of his dissertation is based on these test results.

Salum stressed that all test subjects showed a similar level of physical fitness and were living under very similar conditions during their mission. The soldiers underwent the same tests when they returned after the 6-month service period. Continue reading →

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Why Tartu? Why not!

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Rūta Petersonaitė

We are starting a 4-part series on student life by Rūta Petersonaitė, a fourth year student of publishing at Vilnius University, who is currently spending this autumn semester in Tartu. Don’t want to miss the coming parts? Subscribe to our blog by email or RSS.

Rūta (Lithuania)

I am probably not the only one to recall the last days before leaving for Tartu and the so-called exchange student adventure! Those days were filled with packing and checking the list of things I should not forget (some national gourmet food and drinks, a camera, disco T-shirt, etc.) and listening to the final counsel of “post-Erasmus” friends:

“You will probably spend 50% of your time studying and 50% discovering the Erasmus Universe. I’m not sure if you will spend more money on study books than on parties and traveling, and in any case, it’s not that important where you go, but what you are going to do there. On Mondays you will have pasta, Tuesdays croissants and Wednesdays “Eisbein mit Sauerkraut”. You will probably fall in love with somebody, spend time crawling from pub to pub (metaphorically or literally) and your number of Facebook friends will increase by 30% – just be open-minded and your year abroad will be a time to remember”. Continue reading →

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How Risky Is It for Kids to Be Online?

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Lauri Randveer

12% of kids in Europe have been upset by online content.

A new study by the EU Kids Online research network, based on interviews with 23,000 children and their parents across Europe, shows that more than one in eight 9–16-year-old children have been bothered or upset by online content.

The offensive web content mostly includes pornography, sexual or offensive messages and potentially harmful user-generated web content.

UT Professor of Media Studies Veronika Kalmus, who led the project’s Estonian team, says that the youngest children are those who find it hardest to cope with upsetting web content, but that kids are going online at ever-younger ages – an average of seven in Sweden and eight in Estonia, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK.

Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and the Czech Republic comprise the countries where children were more at risk online, with Italy, Portugal and Turkey showing the least risk. More than 60 percent of Estonian children have encountered various online risks. Continue reading →

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What Makes Some Drivers Speed?

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Lauri Randveer

Reasons as to why some drivers tend to exceed speed limits constantly and why some are prone to drunk driving are entirely different, a study by UT researchers suggests.

A study commissioned by the Estonian Road Administration and carried out by a team of researchers led by Jaanus Harro, UT Professor of Psychophysiology, sheds light on biological factors behind risky traffic behaviours such as speeding and drunk driving.

According to Diva Eensoo, a member of the team and research fellow in healthcare management at the UT Department of Public Health, drunk drivers and speeders exhibit two entirely different types of impulsive behaviour.

Causes are found in the brain

In both cases the underlying causes can be attributed to the person’s impulsivity and tendency to seek excitement. However, whereas a drunk person decides to sit behind the steering wheel without considering the potential consequences of his or her actions, speeders tend to be very aware of what they are doing. Continue reading →

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From +34°C in India to -32°C in Estonia

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Inga Külmoja

I was almost closing my laptop when I saw a short and happy email from a person I didn’t know who claimed to be the first Indian student to have defended his PhD at the University of Tartu.

A few days later I was wandering around the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology looking for Gyaneshwer Chaubey without even knowing how I should pronounce his name. We met and sat down for a chat.

Gyaneshwer arrived to Estonia in January 2006 wearing a very thin jacket and a light coat. It was -32°C and dark, and he was confused as to whether it was day or night. Professor Toomas Kivisild was waiting for him, Gyaneshwer recalls: I was surprised to see he had two big jackets for me. He wrapped them around me, put me in his car [laughs] and brought me here.

Pizzas with the supervisor and colleagues saved Gyaneshwer from hunger, and he later fell in love with Estonian kama. The fresh doctor in Molecular Biology prefers the work culture in Tartu to Cambridge, finds similarities between Saaremaa and India, and laughs a lot.

Listen to the interview:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

________



All photos are by Jüri Parik, a lecturer of Evolutionary Biology at UT.

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The Rich Tend To Be Less Religious

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Siim Sepp

A recently published study found that 84 percent of people consider religion to be an important part of their daily lives. A strong relationship exists between a country’s socioeconomic status and the religiosity of its residents – the richer the country, the less important religion is to its population. However, there are some exceptions, including Estonia.

The wooden 17th century church on the island of Ruhnu, home to only 56 people, is empty. So are most of the churches in Estonia, as only 16 percent of the country's population is religious. Image credit: Toomas Tuul.

According to the study conducted by the Gallup Organization, which was based on surveys in 114 countries in 2009, only 47 percent of populations in the richest countries (those with average annual per-capita incomes above $25,000) claimed that religion was significant to them. In the poorest countries of the world, with average per-capita incomes of $2,000 or less, the proportion that said that religion was important in their daily lives was 95 percent. Continue reading →

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Estonians Don’t Get Enough Vitamin D

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Villu Päärt

Even at the end of the summer season, one third of Estonians have too little vitamin D in their bodies.

According to the doctoral thesis which Mart Kull defended at the University of Tartu’s Faculty of Medicine, this is most severe during the winter, when 73% of the Estonian population has less vitamin D than required and 8% suffers from complete vitamin deficiency.

A study carried out at the University of Tartu Internal Medicine Clinic collected data from nearly 400 healthy persons, aged 25-70, from all over Estonia.

“Such a large-scale vitamin D deficiency in Estonia is surprising, as the situation in the neighbouring northern countries is better,” said Kull.

Dairy products fortified with vitamin D, which partly compensate for the vitamin deficiency caused by the lack of sunshine during winters, have been available in Finland, Sweden, Norway and USA for years.

None of the Baltic countries are currently fortifying food with vitamin D. It is available as a food supplement from pharmacies, but practically none of the people who participated in the survey were using supplements containing vitamin D.

Another source of vitamin D is fish, but fish is not a very popular food in Estonia. Continue reading →

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