Keyword: Press release

Scientists from the University of Turku, Finland, have found that male and female Asian elephants differ in their personality. Previous work on a timber elephant population from Myanmar has shown that Asian elephants have three personality factors: Attentiveness, Sociability and Aggressiveness. The new study demonstrates that male elephants score higher on the Aggressiveness trait than females, whereas female elephants score higher on the Sociability trait than males.

Stars over eight times more massive than the Sun end their lives in supernovae explosions. The composition of the star influences what happens during the explosion.

The University of Turku had its 99th Anniversary Celebration on 28 February. At the event, Editor-in-chief Ville Pernaa was awarded as the Alumni of the Year. In addition, Rector Kalervo Väänänen highlighted the autonomy of academic education and degree system in his speech.

The University of Turku opens the call for applications to the Pentti Malaska Futures Award on the national Futures Day on 1 March 2019. We are looking for research-based, visionary, and boundary-crossing solutions supporting the building of a more sustainable global future.

The higher the cotinine levels were in the mother’s blood during pregnancy, the greater was the child’s risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later in life, showed an epidemiological study conducted by the Research Centre for Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku. Globally, it is the first study in which the connection between fetal nicotine exposure and diagnosis of ADHD was shown by measuring cotinine levels from pregnant maternal serum specimens.

Developed by researchers at the University of Turku, an immunotherapeutic antibody therapy re-educates macrophages to activate passivated cytotoxic T cells to kill cancer. The antibody therapy prevented the growth of tumours in several mouse models. The development of the therapy has now progressed to patient testing in a phase I/II clinical trial.

The World Bank is funding the University of Turku and four Tanzanian universities in developing geospatial expertise to control risks posed by floods and climate change. Cities in Tanzania are especially vulnerable to the extreme phenomena caused by climate change due to population growth and weak urban planning.

Traditional elephant handling worldwide is rapidly changing. Researchers from the University of Turku in Finland and Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE) veterinarians found mahouts in Myanmar are only 22 years old on average, with an average experience of three years working with elephants, and they are changing elephants yearly preventing the development of long-term bonds between elephants and mahouts. These shifts contrast the traditional elephant-keeping system of skills being accumulated over a lifetime of working with the same elephant before being taught to the younger generation.

A new study conducted at the University of Turku shows that grandmother involvement with their grandchildren improves the survival of the grandchildren. Based on historical Finnish church records, the study however finds the ability to provide help to young grandchildren declines with grandmother age and deteriorated health.

The most popular programmes were Global Innovation Management, Biomedical Sciences, Digital Health and Life Sciences, as well as Information Security and Cryptography that received 725 applications in total. All in all, the international Master’s degree programmes received 1,376 applications from 94 countries, as the number of applications in the previous year was 1,116.