Whoever controls the world’s maritime transport flows controls the world. This phrase has, over the centuries, guided everyone from Christopher Columbus and the East India Companies of the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries to US President Donald Trump.
Electrical engineering expert and beekeeper Aleksander Kilk writes that bees play a far greater role than merely producing honey: they preserve biodiversity, support food security and offer people an example of intelligent cooperation. In his view, we ourselves could learn a good deal from a bee colony: how to act collectively, purposefully and in harmony with nature.
Ideally, bathing water quality monitoring should provide people with a quick and reliable answer to a very simple question: is it safe to go swimming today or not? In practice, however, this information often reaches people too late.
Opposing science and faith has become customary in the West – but what if the two are, in fact, inseparable?
Establishing a single time zone in the European Union would facilitate business operations, reduce complexity in the transport and logistics sector, and promote international relations and cooperation, writes Mike Wahl, Associate Professor at the TalTech Department of Business Administration, in his commentary.
This year’s Young Engineer Award of the President of the Republic’s Cultural Foundation has been bestowed upon Karolina Kudelina-Zhang, an energy researcher at TalTech’s Virumaa College, and Annika Kaalep, Senior Biomedical Engineer and Head of Department at the North Estonia Medical Centre.
Rail Baltica was meant to connect the Baltic states to Europe’s rail network by 2026, but it has ended up at a very different station: the timetable has slipped, the budget is ballooning, and the project is being pared back step by step into a “simplified” version. Karsten Staehr examines why this megaproject has drifted onto a course of predictable failure.
When people talk about drones, the focus tends to fall on technology – autonomy, artificial intelligence, and swarms. Tõnis Voitka, CEO of the Estonian defense company KrattWorks and a TalTech alumnus, instead turns a serious eye to manufacturing and business models. In his view, the course of drone warfare is determined not only by the sophistication of the systems, but also by the speed and scale of drone production and the sustainability of the company producing them.
Estonia’s startup scene is often described through success stories: big exits, fast-scaling teams, and the hunt for the next unicorn. But the researcher at TalTech Department of Business Administration Entrepreneurship and International Business Unit Jan Harima suggests a different lens – one that focuses less on single wins and more on what happens to people, money and know-how over time.
One of the most substantial discussions at the defence conference EstMil.tech, co-organised by Tallinn University of Technology, was a panel in which defence experts from different countries and backgrounds examined the military role and potential of artificial intelligence. The question was simple yet sharp: whether – and to what extent – does AI change decision-making on the battlefield?