Latest news with #AaltoUniversity
NDTV
3 days ago
- Science
- NDTV
Top Universities In Finland For Indian Students, As Per QS Rankings
Top Universitites In Finland 2025: Finland continues to be a popular destination for students due to its world-class education system, which emphasizes highly trained teachers and gives them the freedom to decide their teaching methods and pace. Several Finnish universities have secured top positions in the QS Global University Rankings 2026. Teachers in Finland are mandatorily required to hold a bachelor's and master's degree in teaching and must go through competitive training programs. Education in Finland is seen as a National priority in Finland. Here are some of the top Finnish universities that Indian students can consider, based on the QS World Rankings 2026. 1. Aalto University, Finland Aalto University is ranked 114th among the top universities of the world and currently has 2,750 international students studying. While Alto University provides courses in both bachelor's and master's, it puts more emphasis on its Masters by providing 94 courses in several disciplines, including Arts and Humanities (18), Business and Management (12), Engineering and Technology (47), Life Sciences and Medicine (1), Natural Sciences (4), Social Sciences and Management (12 programs). Tuition-Fees For Bachelor's Programs - Rs.12,02,544 to Rs.15,03,180 For Master's - Rs.15,03,180 to Rs.20,04,240 2. University of Helsinki, Finland The University of Helsinki is the second best Finnish university with a global rank of 116. It has a total of 1,437 students studying as of now and is the largest and oldest academic institution, developed in 1640. The University provides bachelor courses in only Faculty of Science and a total of 35 master's programs in various faculties including Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry (6), Faculty of Arts (4), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences (5), Faculty of Educational Sciences (1), Faculty of Law (2), Faculty of Medicine (1), Faculty of Pharmacy (1), Faculty of Science (11), Faculty of Social Sciences (4). The tuition-fees starts from Rs.13,02,756 for both the degrees. 3. University of Oulu, Finland The University of Oulu, Finland is ranked 342 among the top universities of the world with currently 909 international students enrolled. It provides one bachelor's program in International Business Management and 21 Master's programs in several fields, including: Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine (1) Faculty of Education and Psychology (2) Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (6) Faculty of Medicine (1) Faculty of Technology (3) Oulu Business School (6) Oulu Mining School (1) Oulu School of Architecture (1) The tuition-fee for admission to the University of Oulu starts from Rs.12,02,544 and can vary up to Rs.60,12,720. 4. University of Turku, Finland The University of Turku, Finland is an international research university ,ranked 366th among the top universities of the world as per the QS World University Rankings 2026. Currently, 705 international students are enrolled in the University. The tuition-fee starts from 11,000 euros (Rs.11,02,332). 5. Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT) LUT is the fifth best Finnish university with a global ranking of 397 as per the QS World University Rankings 2026. The university currently has 1,002 students studying in both Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs.
Sustainability Times
06-07-2025
- Science
- Sustainability Times
'We're Closer Than Ever to Einstein's Dream': Scientists Edge Toward Unlocking Quantum Gravity After Decades of Searching
IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 Finnish researchers have introduced a groundbreaking theory that aims to unify gravity with other fundamental forces. with other fundamental forces. 🧬 This new approach employs a gauge symmetry for gravity, similar to the symmetries used in the Standard Model . for gravity, similar to the symmetries used in the . 🔬 The theory addresses the long-standing incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics . and . 🌌 Researchers invite global scientific collaboration to overcome technical challenges and further develop this promising theory. In the ever-evolving field of theoretical physics, a groundbreaking advancement has emerged that promises to bridge the elusive gap between gravity and the other fundamental forces of nature. This promising breakthrough, achieved by Finnish researchers, could potentially unlock new insights into the origins of the universe. The innovative approach, developed by physicists Mikko Partanen and Jukka Tulkki from Aalto University, offers a novel quantum perspective on gravity. Published in the esteemed journal Reports on Progress in Physics, their theory aligns with gauge theories akin to those of the Standard Model, marking a significant step toward a unified understanding of fundamental interactions. The Role of Gauge Theories in Physics A gauge theory is a theoretical framework in physics that describes how fundamental particles interact with one another. It is based on the invariance of equations under certain transformations, known as gauge transformations. In the Standard Model of particle physics, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are all described by gauge theories. Each force is associated with a particular type of symmetry and mediated by particles, such as the photon for electromagnetism. The challenge with incorporating gravity into this framework has been its apparent incompatibility with gauge symmetry. However, the new approach proposed by Partanen and Tulkki introduces a gauge symmetry for gravity, similar to those of other forces. If validated, this could pave the way for unifying all fundamental forces within a single theoretical framework. This would represent a monumental leap in our understanding of the universe, potentially leading to a comprehensive theory of everything. 'Trees Are Poisoning the Air': Shocking New Study Reveals Natural Plant Defenses May Be Making Pollution Worse The Critical Importance of Renormalization in Quantum Physics Renormalization is a mathematical technique used to address the infinities that arise in quantum field theory calculations. It allows physicists to obtain finite and predictive physical results, ensuring the practicality of theoretical models. In the realm of quantum gravity, renormalization presents a particularly formidable challenge. Due to the weakness of gravitational interactions, their quantum effects are notoriously difficult to observe and compute. For any theory of quantum gravity to be deemed viable, it must be demonstrably renormalizable across all levels of calculation. This is a crucial criterion for establishing the physical relevance of the theory. If Partanen and Tulkki's approach meets this requirement, it could provide a consistent framework for exploring extreme phenomena, such as black holes or the universe's nascent moments. Successfully addressing these challenges could revolutionize our understanding of cosmology and high-energy physics, opening novel avenues for scientific exploration. 'Ancient Gene Switch Flipped': Scientists Restore Limb Regeneration in Mice Using Dormant DNA Once Thought Lost Forever Bridging General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics The longstanding incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics has been a persistent obstacle in theoretical physics. General relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein, describes the gravitational force and the curvature of spacetime on large scales, while quantum mechanics governs the behavior of particles on the smallest scales. The Finnish researchers' theory aims to resolve this discord by employing a symmetry akin to that of the Standard Model, rather than the traditional symmetry of general relativity, to describe gravity. This innovative approach could potentially illuminate the enigmatic singularities associated with black holes and the Big Bang. Furthermore, it might offer explanations for the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. By addressing these profound questions, the theory represents a significant stride toward a unified understanding of fundamental forces, potentially transforming our perception of the cosmos and its origins. 'Troops Could Vanish Like Squid': New Bio-Inspired Camo Lets US Soldiers Evade Sight and High-Tech Sensors Instantly Inviting Global Scientific Collaboration In publishing their groundbreaking work, Partanen and Tulkki have extended an invitation to the global scientific community to participate in the development of their theory. They express optimism that their approach will inspire further research, much like quantum mechanics and relativity have done in the past. By fostering collaboration, they hope to overcome current technical obstacles, such as the challenges of renormalization, in the coming years. This theory represents a critical step toward a unified comprehension of fundamental forces. If successful, it could ultimately revolutionize our understanding of the universe and its origins. As the scientific community continues to explore these possibilities, one must wonder: how soon will we witness the dawn of a new era in theoretical physics, where all forces are understood as one? Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article. Did you like it? 4.2/5 (22)
Forbes
26-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
LGBTQ-Friendly Policies Bolster Corporate Innovation, New Study Shows
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 7: Participants from Delta Airlines walk in the WorldPride Parade on June 7, ... More 2025 in Washington, DC. This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Pride celebrations in Washington, DC and is host to WorldPride 2025. (Photo by) Companies that have policies designed to ensure their workplaces are LGBTQ-friendly are more likely to be innovative that those who don't according to a new study that draws on almost a decade and a half of data. The research, done by academics at Finland's Aalto University and the University of Vaasa, is based on data from the Corporate Equality Index—a benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices, and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees—as well as figures from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other public sources. It established that for every standard deviation increase in a company's CEI, the number of patents increased by 20 percent. The academics also found that LGBTQ-friendly firms demonstrated an almost 25 percent increase in the number of patent citations, which is broadly considered an indication of how other companies value the innovativeness of a particular patent. Other studies in the past have determined a link between profitability and workplace diversity more generally. This, however, is the first to specifically examine sexuality and gender-inclusivity as it relates to innovation. 'Our results demonstrate that firms with progressive LGBTQ policies produce more patents, have more patent citations, and have higher innovation quality as measured by patent originality, generality, and internationality,' commented Jukka Sihvonen, from Aalto University School of Business. 'Innovation is the fuel that drives both growth and profitability. Companies need innovation,' he added. 'The magnitudes of impact linked to LGBTQ-friendliness are big — and that means that the economic significance is too.' These latest findings are particularly timely considering the widespread rollback of corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in response to the Trump administration's executive orders. In January, almost immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump issued a slew of orders targeting DEI programs both in the public and private sector. In response, many companies across the U.S. and beyond, announced that they were rolling back such initiatives or pausing programs. References to diversity, equity and inclusion in Fortune 100 company reports have also dropped. According to an analysis by Gravity Research, they declined by 72% between 2024 and 2025. But surveys of corporate leaders show that a sizable contingent of managers still see the value of DEI initiatives. One example: A national survey—conducted by Catalyst, a consultancy focused on creating inclusive workspaces, in conjunction with the NYU School of Law's Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—recently found that 83% of C-suite leaders and 88% of legal leaders said that they believe maintaining or expanding DEI is essential to mitigating legal risk. That survey also showed that 77% of the executives believe DEI initiatives are positively correlated with improved financial performance, and 81% think that a focus on DEI was likely to bolster customer loyalty. The new research out of Finland used analytical methods to control for bias, and found that the link between inclusivity and innovation existed regardless of the political context. 'The results get marginally stronger when most conservative states are excluded, but the difference is really minor, and the findings remain largely the same when the most liberal states are left out,' explained Sami Vähämaa from the University of Vaasa, who also led the research. And Veda Fatmy, a co-author from the University of Vaasa, noted that although the research drew on data collected between 2003 and 2017, extrapolating beyond that time frame suggests that the positive trend might actually be getting stronger over time.
News.com.au
24-06-2025
- Science
- News.com.au
Billions missing? Truth behind world population ‘miscount'
Is there a whole country's worth of people we don't know about? According to Worldometer's live count, which is actually quite overwhelming to stare at for longer than a few minutes, the global population is currently pinned at 8.2 billion people. But what if that figure is way off? A new study from Finland's Aalto University has uncovered startling evidence, suggesting we might be vastly underestimating the number of people on Earth. These 'missing' people aren't hidden - they're said to be living in rural areas right under our noses. The study analysed data from 307 rural dam projects across 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia, Poland, India, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam, between 1975 and 2010. These projects required the resettlement of populations providing records of displaced individuals. The figures were compared with five widely used global population datasets, and according to postdoc researcher Josias Lang-Ritter, whose findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, these tallies tell a very different story. GRUMP: Underestimated rural populations by 67% LandScan: Underestimated rural populations by 68% Lang observed: 'We were very surprised to see how large this underrepresentation is.' Andrew Tatem, Director of WorldPop, clarified to New Scientist that their grid-level estimates combine broad census and satellite data, and that the quality of satellite imagery before 2010 is less reliable. 'The further you go back in time, the more those problems come about,' he says. 'I think that's something that's well understood.' Tatem suggests that advances in machine learning and AI could help to fill these gaps. Rural populations are often overlooked because census teams struggle to reach remote areas, contend with poor infrastructure, track people who move frequently, and work with limited resources. Additionally, population estimates are typically developed for cities where people live in close proximity, often failing to accurately capture the dispersed nature of rural communities. 'The impacts may be quite huge, because these datasets are used for very many different kinds of actions,' Lang explains. 'This includes planning transport infrastructure, building healthcare facilities and risk reduction efforts in natural disasters and epidemics.' 'We can say that nowadays, population estimates are likely conservative accounting, and we have reason to believe there are significantly more than these 8 billion people.' But hold off on telling your trivia team for now, because not everyone is sold. 'The study suggests that regional population counts of where people are living within countries have been estimated incorrectly, though it is less clear that this would necessarily imply that national estimates of the country are wrong,' says Associate Professor Martin Kolk from Stockholm University, Sweden. Dr Stuart Gietel-Basten from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology called the idea 'not realistic,' telling New Scientist that 'if we really are undercounting by that massive amount, it's a massive news story and goes against all the years of thousands of other datasets.' 'I think it's a very big jump to state that there is a great undercount in places like Finland, Australia, Sweden, and other places with very sophisticated registration systems, based on one or two data points.' However, despite his strong doubts, Gietel-Basten agrees it couldn't hurt to 'invest more in data collection in rural areas.' True or not, Census Bureau surveys undercount young children in some regions, especially girls, due to cultural or bureaucratic biases. A preliminary response from First Focus on Children to the 2030 Census proposal, highlights that 'Children under five are especially likely to be missed if they live in complex or multi-family homes, live with grandparents or other relatives, are poor and/or experiencing homelessness, move frequently, are children of colour, or are linguistically isolated.' People forced out by conflict also often move without official records, and satellite imagery relying on city lights miss rural homes without electricity. Several factors like these could be skewing population data. But are billions of people really living off the literal grid, or is this just another bold theory? Experts remain sceptical, but it could completely change how we see global growth and development. Then again, maybe we're undercounting the world population because half of us are now just AI chatbots pretending to be humans.
The Guardian
31-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Are there billions more people on earth than we thought? If so, it's no bad thing
According to the UN, the world's population stands at just over 8.2 billion. However, a recent study suggests the figure could be hundreds of millions or even billions higher. This news might sound terrifying, but it is important to remember that anxieties about overpopulation are rarely just about the numbers. They reflect power struggles over which lives matter, who is a burden or a threat and ultimately what the future should look like. The world's population reached 1 billion just after the turn of the 19th century. The number of people on the planet then began to grow exponentially, doubling to 2 billion by about 1925 and again to 4 billion about 50 years later. On 15 November 2022, the UN announced the birth of the eight billionth human. As it is not possible to count every single person in the world, the UN's population figures are calculated by dividing the Earth's surface into a grid and using census data to estimate how many people live in each square. This method provides a rough estimate, but until now it was thought to be reasonably reliable. A recent study by Dr Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University in Finland discovered that UN estimates undercount the number of people living in rural areas by more than 50%. This is because census data in the global south is often incomplete or unreliable outside big cities. Consequently, UN figures probably underestimate the world population by hundreds of millions or several billion. Many people argue that our planet does not have the resources to support 8 billion people. 'Overpopulation' is seen as the root cause of many of the world's biggest problems. But these concerns are nothing new. In 1988, the US sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov used what he referred to as 'my bathroom metaphor' to illustrate his fears about population growth. 'If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom.' But if 20 people live in the same apartment, they will impinge on each other's liberty one way or another. According to Asimov, rapid population growth creates a similar problem. It not only places enormous pressure on natural resources, but also erodes autonomy, dignity and civility. 'As you put more and more people on to the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.' At the turn of the 19th century, when there were fewer than a billion inhabitants on Earth, Thomas Malthus was already convinced that 'the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived'. Malthus's inability to predict that technology would revolutionise food production did not dent his popularity. On the contrary, as the world population grew, the prophets of doom grew ever louder. Neo-Malthusian anxieties reached fever pitch with Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb – subtitled Population Control or Race to Oblivion (1968). This hugely influential, bestselling book warned: 'The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.' These devastating predictions encouraged governments and international agencies to take drastic action. As fertility rates were already falling in most high-income countries, these efforts concentrated on Africa and even more so Asia. USAID funded family planning programmes across what was then referred to as the developing world. Millions of Indian men were sterilised during the Emergency of the mid-1970s. In 1979, the Chinese Communist party introduced the one-child policy and a few years later launched a mass sterilisation campaign, which focused mainly on women. Today, plenty of people remain concerned about overpopulation, but their apocalyptic visions now concentrate on climate change, resource depletion and biodiversity loss. Despite stark disparities in consumption – Americans consume 360 times more carbon per capita than Somalis, for example – population control still focuses on the majority world. Thankfully, the coercive policies that took place in India, China and elsewhere are no longer in vogue. The new approach to population control focuses instead on women's empowerment. Educating women and giving them control over their lives has proved remarkably effective at reducing fertility rates. In the 1960s, women had on average five children each. Today, the figure is 2.3 per woman – just over what is needed to keep the population stable. By 2100 the global birthrate is projected to fall to 1.8. According to the UN, the world's population will peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. After this it will stabilise, then fall. The exponential growth that gave Malthusians so many sleepless nights has been halted. That many people will put considerable stress on the Earth's resources, but if consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed, the world will avoid an apocalyptic catastrophe. Returning to Asimov's bathroom metaphor, as anyone who has crammed into one house with their extended family over Christmas knows, many people sharing few bathrooms creates a suboptimal situation. You won't be able to shower exactly when you want – and you'd better make it a short one. But this hardly amounts to the end of civilisation. In fact, compromise and sharing is probably closer to most people's idea of a good life than having the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Population growth varies starkly between regions. In most high-income countries, fertility rates are already well below the replacement level. The African continent is projected to account for over half the world's population growth in the next three decades, with Asia and Latin America responsible for the rest. As the historian Alison Bashford points out, concerns about overpopulation are often not really about there being too many people but too many of the wrong kind of people. Ethnonationalists in Europe and North America see the disparities in birthrates as an existential threat to 'western civilisation'. They worry about their countries being indelibly changed by mass migration. But the cold hard truth is that in a few decades our shrinking, ageing societies will desperately need these newcomers to pay taxes and work in healthcare and social care. This vision of the future may be unsettling for some, but the alternative is much worse. To extend Asimov's metaphor, the populist right advocates a sort of bathroom apartheid. They are en suite isolationists, who want to retain exclusive use over one of the bathrooms in the apartment, and force the 19 other flatmates to share. At first, this approach has its advantages. They can soak in the bath all day. They can sit for hours on the can reading the news. But sooner or later they will come a cropper. Perhaps the other toilet becomes blocked and the whole flat is inundated with raw sewage. The other flatmates might forcibly seize control of the personal bathroom. Or as the en suite isolationists grow old and infirm, they'll find themselves with no one to bathe them or wipe their bottoms. Jonathan Kennedy teaches politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, and is the author of Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
