63 Degrees North

If you've ever seen an infant lying on its back, you've surely seen them endlessly waving their arms and legs in seemingly haphazard ways. And crying? To the uneducated eye and ear, it does all seem a little... unplanned. But from their earliest moments, infants actually cry in a way that suggests they're already learning the patterns of their mother's language while in the womb! And when you see them waving their arms around? They're actually deliberately trying to figure out what this thing is on the end of their arm, and how can they get it to do what they want? The way babies move not only tells us loads about healthy infant development, but about whether things might not be quite right, especially when it comes to problems such as cerebral palsy. Today's guests help us decode the meanings of these movements, why they matter, and what parents in particular need to know to help stimulate their babies' development in the best possible way. Our first guest, Audrey van der Meer, a professor of…

ENCORE: This episode was first published in Oct. 2023. Sierra Leone used to be the most dangerous place in the world to give birth. Without enough doctors to do C-sections, women and babies were dying. But what if you didn't need a doctor? This week, the story of two determined surgeons and a no-so radical idea that is saving lives in Sierra Leone — one emergency operation at a time. You can read more about the non-profit organization the doctors created at capacare.org Our guests on the show are Håkon Bolkan, Alex van Duinen and Emmanuel Tommy. You can download the episode transcript here: Here are some of the articles discussed in the show: Bolkan, HA et al. (2015) Met and unmet need for surgery in Sierra Leone: a comprehensive retrospective countrywide survey from all healthcare facilities performing surgery in 2012. Surgery Brolin, K et al. (2016) The Impact of the West Africa Ebola Outbreak on Obstetric Health Care in Sierra Leone. PLOS ONE Bolkan, HA et al.. (2017) Safety, productivity and predicted…

ENCORE: This episode was first published in Sept. 2023. In 1998, a young Norwegian exercise physiologist found that a technique he had used to help Olympic athletes could help heart patients too. But his idea made doctors sweat. One famous cardiologist told him that if he used his technique in human heart attack patients, he "would kill them." Today's show looks at what happened when our researcher, Ulrik Wisløff, defied the experts — and built a career learning how high intensity interval training can help everyone from heart patients and ageing Baby Boomers, and possibly even Alzheimer's patients — but not in the way you might think! Today's guests are Ulrik Wisløff, Dorthe Stensvold and Atefe Tari. Here's a link to a rat on a treadmill photo. And here's a link to a transcript. Here's a list of some of the research mentioned in the podcast: Wisløff U, et al. Intensity-controlled treadmill running in rats: VO(2 max) and cardiac hypertrophy. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2001 Mar;280(3):H1301-10. Wisløff…

Historians have floated a half-dozen theories for why Viking Greenland settlements suddenly vanished in the 1300s and 1400s, after nearly 500 years of occupation. Was it climate change, the Black Death, even bad farming habits learned in Scandinavia? But what if…it all came down to walrus ivory? It turns out that walrus tusks during the Viking and Middle Ages fuelled a long-distance trade network that stretched from Inuit hunters far above the Arctic Circle to churches and royalty in cities as far flung as Novgorod, Kyiv and Cologne. Now, using ancient DNA and isotope analysis, archaeologists have shown that virtually all these tusks came from Greenland! And then suddenly, the market collapsed. What happened? Today's show looks at how everything from cutting edge technology to dogged footwork has allowed researchers to piece together the details of the global walrus trade a thousand years back in time. They're also using this window into the past to better understand walruses themselves, to make predictions…

NTNU professor Marit Otterlei nearly threw out the contaminated cell culture where she and her colleagues were testing a new cancer drug. The problem arose on a hot summer day, in Trondheim, in a country not known for hot summer days. So they'd opened the lab's windows overnight. When they came back the next day, they found an uninvited guest, snuggled in with their cancer cell culture: Bacteria!!! Here's the thing, though: although the drug had been designed to work on human cancer cells, it looked like it had killed the bacteria, too! That was remarkable, because the cancer drug targeted a specific mechanism that human cells use to replicate. It looked like the drug also targeted the same mechanism in bacteria -- even though the tree of life had branched away from bacteria 3 BILLION years ago! How could that be? Today's podcast takes a peek into the challenging world of what it takes to bring a drug, especially an antibiotic, to market. But it’s also an inside look into how some researchers, with their…

We may think the Vikings were all the same, but it turns out that Viking violence wasn’t the same everywhere. New research shows that Norwegian Vikings were buried with 50 times more weapons—and had a lot more injuries—than their neighbours in Denmark. And there were other dramatic differences that researchers were able to uncover, even after the passage of more than a thousand years. This episode digs into what those differences might mean. Why were Norwegian Vikings more violent? Was something going on in their society? And were swords really the handguns of Viking society? My guests on today's show were Lisa Mariann Strand, a PhD research fellow at NTNU, Jan Bill, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo and David Jacobson, a sociologist at the University of South Florida. You can read about Bill's project studying the Gokstad ship here, and you can see picture and description of the ship on the webpages of the Museum of the Viking Age here. Here are some links to the articles we discussed in the show:…

Jimmy Chaciga, a PhD research fellow at Makerere University in Uganda, thinks he has what it will take to get Ugandan households to adopt solar-powered cookers. First, cookers need to be simple to operate. They need to be cheap. They need to be able to cook once the sun has gone down. But most of all, they need to be able to cook beans. "If you can cook beans, you can cook anything," he says. Armed with two drums, a lot of insulation, some solar panels and a dream, Chaciga is trying to bring his cooker to Ugandan households and institutions that need it the most. Chaciga is one of a group of African researchers working with NTNU's Ole Jørgen Nydal under projects funded by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for International Development, and the University Network on PhD Programmes in Energy Technology (UNET), co-funded by the EU's Erasmus + programme. Here's the situation: After decades of research and funding to help households in developing countries shift away from firewood, charcoal and other biomass, 75%…

When the phone rang 10 years ago while Norwegian neuroscientist May-Britt Moser was in a particularly engaging lab meeting, she almost didn't answer it. Good thing she did! It was Göran Hansson, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, with the news: May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, along with their mentor and colleague John O’Keefe from the University College London, had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of two types of brain cells that work together to function like a GPS in the brain. That system allows animals -including us - to know where they are, and navigate to where they want to go. This was a groundbreaking discovery because it gave us critical insight into how an area of the brain, far from the normal sensory inputs of sight, sound and touch, constructs its own way of understanding space. And, because this same area of the brain, and our ability to navigate, are affected early on in Alzheimer's patients, it offers an inroad for clinicians…

Nobelmen and women, in fancy clothing and pearls – but with dragon wings and tails. A laughing man with a full head of curly hair. Lions biting the ears off a man whose mouth is full of writhing serpents. These may sound like a weird combination of a gothic novel and a nightmare, but they're something completely different – a description of some of the eerie and surprising sculptures in Nidaros Cathedral, the northernmost gothic cathedral in the world that's located in NTNU's hometown of Trondheim. But what were the messages that stonemasons and religious leaders were trying to send visitors to the cathedral – and how do we interpret these messages 800 years later? My guests on today's show are Øystein Ekroll, chief archaeologist and researcher at the Nidaros Cathedral Restoration Workshop and Margrete Syrstad Andås, an art historian and associate professor at NTNU's Department of Art and Media Studies. You can read more about the history of the cathedral in this article from Norwegian SciTech News:…

This episode was originally aired on March 16, 2021. Norway doesn't seem like a natural place for the aluminium industry to blossom. But somehow, it did – due in part to the unlikely combination of WWII Germany, a modest English engineer who created a worker’s paradise, an ambitious industrialist prosecuted as a traitor and a hardworking PhD. All of these factors and personalities helped build modern Norway, one aluminium ingot at a time. Today's guests are Hans Otto Frøland, Svein Richard Brandtzæg and Randi Holmestad. Frøland is one of the researchers working in the Fate of Nations project, which is based at NTNU and focused on the global history and political economy of natural resources. To see archival photographs related to the episode, check out this companion article in Norwegian SciTech News. You can read more about the history of aluminium in Norway here: From Warfare to Welfare: Business-Government Relations in the Aluminium Industry (2012) Frøland, Hans Otto; Ingulstad, Mats Akademika Forlag…

This episode originally aired on Feb. 16, 2022. Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed over decades of archaeological excavations. One question archaeologists are working on right now has a lot of relevance in a pandemic: Can insight into the health conditions of the past shed light on pandemics in our own time? Now, with the help of old bones and dental plaque, researchers are learning about how diseases evolved in medieval populations, and what society did to stem them — and how that might help us in the future. Our guests for this episode were Axel Christophersen, a professor of historical archaeology at the NTNU University Museum; Tom Gilbert, a professor at the NTNU University Museum and head of the Center for Evolutionarly Hologenomics based at the University of Copenhagen; and Elisabeth Forrestad Swensen, a PhD candidate at the NTNU University Museum. You can read more about the MedHeal research project on the project’s home page. Here are…

This episode originally aired on January 27, 2021. Krill eyeballs. The werewolf effect. Diel vertical migration. Arctic marine biologists really talk about these things. There’s a reason for that — when it comes to the polar night, when humans see only velvety darkness, krill eyeballs see things a little differently. And when the sun has been gone for months, during the darkest periods of the polar night, the moon does unexpected things to marine organisms. Learn more about what biologists are figuring out about the workings of the polar night — and what it means at a time when the Arctic is warming at a breakneck pace. Our guests for this episode were Jørgen Berge, Geir Johnsen, Laura Hobbs and Jonathan H. Cohen. You can see a transcript of the episode here. Fridtjof Nansen’s book about his Arctic expedition is called Farthest North. You can also read about the other influences his pioneering journey had on science here. You can also read about Geir Johnsen’s different research projects in a series of…

It's 1968 and a Soviet sub carrying nuclear warheads has gone missing – lost, with all hands. The Soviets never found it – but the Americans did – in nearly 5000 meters of water. What follows is the strange tale of Project Azorian, an ultra-secret mission by the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, that played on national fervor over deep sea mining to create an elaborate cover story to raise the sub. This strange tale involved Howard Hughes, a journey around the tip of South America, the 1973 Chilean coup and a 1974 burglary. This last resulted in an expose of what has been called one of the greatest covert operations in the CIA's history. I stumbled onto this story in the course of reporting the episode on Norway's decision to open its seabed to exploration and mining, and couldn't resist making a little podcast extra about it since it's such a bizarre tale. Fortunately, my guest on today's show, Mats Ingulstad, a professor at NTNU's Department of Modern History and Society, was equally fascinated by…

Norway's Mid-Arctic Ocean Ridge is alive with underwater volcanic activity – where big towers called black smokers spew mineral-laden boiling hot water into the ocean. The minerals precipitate out, and have accumulated over millions of years. At the same time, this extreme environment is home to lots of weird creatures mostly unknown to science. This week, a look at the pros and cons of Norway's decision to open an area the size of Italy to extract minerals. Today's guests are Mats Ingulstad, Egil Tjåland, Kurt Aasly and Torkild Bakken. Here are links to some of the articles and opinion pieces mentioned in the show: Norway needs to know much more before actually mining the deep sea Opinion piece written by Mats Ingulstad and his colleagues at Triple Deep, first published Dagens Næringsliv, a national newspaper. This link takes you to the 17 Jan. EU Parliament hearing on Norway's decision. Norway will be the first in the world to approve seabed mining. Is it a good idea? A piece from Norwegian SciTech News…

Our guest on today's show is Anders Hammer Strømman, one of the lead authors for the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on mitigation of climate change, released in April 2022. He was invited to Dubai to the COP 28 climate talks to talk to the shipping industry about how they can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. He also shares his experience – not from the negotiating rooms – but from the perspective of a scientist seeing his work being taken up by policy makers. Here's a link to the IPCC report for which Anders was one of the lead authors: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/chapter/chapter-10/ You can read more about other NTNU researchers, including Helene Muri and Edgar Hertwich, who participated in the conference here: https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2023/12/climate-talks-and-the-way-forward/ https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2023/12/the-energy-footprint-of-architecture-built-by-oil/ https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2021/09/blocking-the-sun-to-control-global-warming/ Hosted on…

In their careful records of climate change over the centuries — and millennia — trees offer a kind of crystal ball on the past. But they can also help researchers figure out everything from what happened in Norway during the Black Death to how Nazis hid an enormous battleship from the Allies during WWII to how much it rained in Norway during millennia past, when it was much warmer than today. Our guests on today's show are Helene Svarva and Claudia Hartl. You can see a transcript of the show here. Here's a selection of academic articles discussed in today's show: Ljungqvist, Fredrik Charpentier; Seim, Andrea; Tegel, Willy; Krusic, Paul J.; Baittinger, Claudia; Belingard, Christelle. (2022) Regional Patterns of Late Medieval and Early Modern European Building Activity Revealed by Felling Dates. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Thun, Terje; Svarva, Helene Løvstrand. (2018) Tree-ring growth shows that the significant population decline in Norway began before the Black Death. Dendrochronologia Svarva, Helene…

When Hitler's troops stormed into Norway on April 9, 1940, Germany's goal was to secure the country’s 1200 km long coastline so iron ore from Swedish mines could continue to flow to the northern Norwegian port of Narvik — and eventually to the German war machine. But that wasn't all that Hitler and his followers hoped for, as Norwegian teachers would come to learn. Vidkun Quisling, a Nazi collaborator who nominally headed the Norwegian government during the occupation, wanted Norway to embrace Nazi ideology. He decided the best way to do this was through teachers and schoolchildren. In February 1942, he ordered all teachers to join a new union that would require them to introduce Nazi doctrine to their students. Students were also ordered to join the Norwegian equivalent of the Hitler Youth. But the teachers refused. They organized using tactics right out of a spy movie to resist — scribbling messages in invisible ink, meeting secretly in basements and train stations, and printing newsletters to coordinate…

Up on the Arctic tundra, a young man in chest waders is wandering around a peat bod, burying tea bags — Lipton tea bags, green tea and rooibos, to be exact. This week, I head to Iskoras mountain, a low peak in far northern Norway, outside of the town of Karasjok to find out what burying tea bags in the tundra — and doing sophisticated measurements in a peat bog —can tell us about the future of permafrost and its effects on the climate. This week's guests are Hanna Lee, Anja Greschkowiak, Lisa van Solt and Daniel Angulo Serrano. Here are some videos that explain the research and show the field site in more detail: A brief description of the project, by Inge Althuizen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4argYGIb8 An artistic video about the project fieldwork by Sasha Azanova. https://vimeo.com/457877275 You can read more about the research in this episode here: Jiao, Yi; Davie-Martin, Cleo L.; Kramshøj, Magnus; Christiansen, Casper Tai; Lee, Hanna; Althuizen, Inge. (2023) Volatile organic compound release across…

Sierra Leone used to be the most dangerous place in the world to give birth. Without enough doctors to do C-sections, women and babies were dying. But what if you didn't need a doctor? This week, the story of two determined surgeons and a no-so radical idea that is saving lives in Sierra Leone — one emergency operation at a time. You can read more about the non-profit organization the doctors created to fund their training programme at capacare.org Our guests on today's show are Håkon Bolkan, Alex van Duinen and Emmanuel Tommy. Here are some of the academic articles discussed in the show: Bolkan, Håkon Angell; Schreeb, Johan; Samai, Mohamed; Bash-Taqi, Donald Alpha; Kamara, T. B.; Salvesen, Øyvind. (2015) Met and unmet need for surgery in Sierra Leone: a comprehensive retrospective countrywide survey from all healthcare facilities performing surgery in 2012. Surgery Brolin, Kim; van Duinen, Aalke Johan; Nordenstedt, Helena; Hoijer, J; Molnes, Ragnhild; Frøseth, Torunn Wigum. (2016) The Impact of the West…

Norwegian technology, courtesy of the 19th-century whaler Svend Foyn, played a critical role in establishing the modern era of industrial whaling.By the time the 1960s rolled around, most large whale populations hovered on the brink of extinction. Now, Norwegian researchers are testing new technologies so they can track and study these marine giants — and help protect them. This week, tapping into fibre-optic cables to eavesdrop on whales in a way that's never been done before— and how deploying a comprehensive library of whale dialects can help prevent ship-whale collisions in busy California shipping ports. This week's guests are Jennifer Bailey, a professor at NTNU's Department of Sociology and Political Science; Martin Landrø, a professor at NTNU's Department of Electronic Systems; Léa Bouffaut, a postdoc at the Cornell University K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics; and Ana Širović, an associate professor at NTNU's Department of Biology. Ana's work with whale dialects and ship strikes is…

In 1998, a young Norwegian exercise physiologist found that a technique he had used to help Olympic athletes could help heart patients too. But his idea made doctors sweat. One famous cardiologist told him that if he used his technique in human heart attack patients, he "would kill them." Today's show looks at what happened when our researcher, Ulrik Wisløff, defied the experts — and built a career learning how high intensity interval training can help everyone from heart patients and ageing Baby Boomers, and possibly even Alzheimer's patients — but not in the way you might think! Our guests on today's show are Ulrik Wisløff, Dorthe Stensvold and Atefe Tari. Here's a link to a rat on a treadmill photo. Here's a list of some of the research mentioned in the podcast, with links: Wisløff U, Helgerud J, Kemi OJ, Ellingsen O. Intensity-controlled treadmill running in rats: VO(2 max) and cardiac hypertrophy. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2001 Mar;280(3):H1301-10. Wisløff U, Støylen A, Loennechen JP, Bruvold M,…

Three tons of wax. A 4-story office building made almost entirely of wood. And putting CO2 to work instead of letting it heat up the planet: Scientists and engineers across the globe are harnessing unlikely materials to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Today's show looks at how a zero-emissions office building combines integrated solar panels, heat pumps and a huge vat of wax to heat and power the structure, with enough left over to sell. We'll also look at highly efficient heat pumps using CO2 as the stuff inside that makes it work. They're spreading worldwide, and can be found everywhere from inside your Volkswagen ID electric car to the Large Hadron Collider. And also — at a hotel in Hell, Norway, where electricity use was cut by 70 per cent — without making a pact with the devil! Our guests on today's show are Tore Kvande and Armin Hafner. There's a video on Professor Hafner's work at CERN here, and more about CoolCERN, here. Find a related podcast episode here. Read more: Nocente, A, Time, B, Mathisen,…

Earlier this year, tremendous floods in Pakistan forced 600,000 pregnant women to leave their homes for safer ground. It was among the latest in a series of nearly unthinkable happenings caused by climate change."Can you imagine if you are about to give birth to a child, and you have to leave your home and flee? These are very traumatic experiences that people have now in all continents, and increasing frequency," says NNTU Professor Edgar Hertwich. He says we all know now that climate change is no longer an abstraction — it's here, and humankind has to act. Hertwich — one of the top 100 climate researchers on the planet — is in a unique position to push the international agenda: he's one of just 15 members on the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which is advising the EU on implementing its new climate law. That matters because the EU is the largest political entity in the world to commit to such ambitious goals. The 27 nations in the EU have committed to cutting their carbon emissions…

We all know that climate change is real and that we have to do something about it. In today's podcast extra episode, we go behind the scenes at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and talk to Anders Hammer Strømman, who was one of the lead authors for their latest report, released in April this year. Anders is a professor at NTNU's Industrial Ecology Programme where he has specialized in Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental input-output analysis, which are tools that enable us to understand the real environmental costs of the goods and materials we use in everyday life. We talk about why cutting carbon emissions quickly is a little like skiing up a big mountain, how battery companies need to come clean when it comes to how they make their products, why some version of a home office could be good for the planet, and why your individual choices can actually make a difference. And we talk about why Anders is optimistic and thinks we can make this shift — even though the governments of the world…

The secrets behind how Norwegian scientists and engineers harnessed the country’s wild waterfalls by developing super efficient turbines — and how advances in turbine technology being developed now may be the future in a zero-carbon world. They include an engineer who figured out how to take advantage of national fervour and build the 1900s equivalent of a super computer, a WWII resistance fighter who saw something special in tiny temperature differences, and researchers today, who are finding ways to cut environmental impacts from current hydropower plants and craft the designs we need to confront climate change. The guests on today's show were Ole Gunnar Dahlhaug, Vera Gütle and Johannes Kverno, with cameo appearances by Hans Otto Frøland and Svein Richard Brandtzæg. You can read an article written to accompany the podcast, with photographs from the lab here There's also an online photo gallery with a brief history of the Waterpower Laboratory here. You can read more about some of the research being done…

Baby grey seals. Polar bears. Zooplankton on painkillers. How do toxic chemicals and substances end up in Arctic animals — and as it happens, native people, too? Our guests on today's show are Bjørn Munro Jenssen, an ecotoxicologist at NTNU, Jon Øyvind Odland, a professor of global health at NTNU and a professor of international health at UiT —The Arctic University of Norway, and Ida Beathe Øverjordet, a researcher at SINTEF. One of the most useful websites on arctic pollution is the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, AMAP. Rachel Carson's book is Silent Spring. Here's a selection of articles from today's episode: Sørmo, E.G., Salmer, M.P., Jenssen, B.M., Hop, H., Bæk, K., Kovacs, K.M., Lydersen, C., Falk-Petersen, S., Gabrielsen, G.W., Lie, E. and Skaare, J.U. (2006), Biomagnification of polybrominated diphenyl ether and hexabromocyclododecane flame retardants in the polar bear food chain in Svalbard, Norway. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 25: 2502-2511. https://doi.org/10.1897/05-591R…

How the unlikely combination of WWII Germany, a modest English engineer who created a worker’s paradise, an ambitious industrialist prosecuted as a traitor and a hardworking PhD helped build modern Norway, one aluminium ingot at a time. Today's guests are Hans Otto Frøland, Svein Richard Brandtzæg and Randi Holmestad. Frøland is one of the researchers working in the Fate of Nations project, which is based at NTNU and focused on the global history and political economy of natural resources. To see archival photographs related to the episode, check out this companion article in Norwegian SciTech News. You can read more about the history of aluminium in Norway here: From Warfare to Welfare: Business-Government Relations in the Aluminium Industry (2012) Frøland, Hans Otto; Ingulstad, Mats Akademika Forlag Frøland, Hans Otto; Kobberrød, Jan Thomas. (2009) The Norwegian Contribution to Göring's Megalomania. Norway's Aluminium Industry during World War II. Cahiers d'histoire de l'aluminium. vol. 42-43. Frøland,…

Why does Norway always rank among the top countries on the planet when it comes to gender equality? It didn't happen by accident. Instead, it took powerful medieval noblewomen, 19th century farmers’ wives, an early 20th century activist on a bicycle, and the feminists who emerged from the postwar baby boom. And yes, there is one Viking woman — but she’s not quite what you might think. Our guests on today's show are Randi Bjørshol Wærdahl, Kari Melby and Marie-Laure Olivier. You can read more about Gunnhild the Viking woman on this Wikipedia page about her. There's also a comprehensive entry about Fredrikke Marie Qvam on Wikipedia. Read more: Wærdahl, Randi Bjørshol.2019: "Manndtz Nature vdj hindis hiertte" - Kvinner i krig og konflikt i nordisk senmiddelalder (Women in war and conflict in the Nordic late Middle Ages (in Norwegian). Collegium Medievale 2019 (2) s. 95-111 Kari Melby, Anna-Birte Ravn, Christina Carlsson Wetterberg (eds.), Gender equality and welfare politics in Scandinavia. The limits of…

Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed over decades of archaeological excavations. One question archaeologists are working on right now has a lot of relevance in during a pandemic: Can insight into the health conditions of the past shed light on pandemics in our own time? Now, with the help of old bones, latrine wastes and dental plaque, researchers are learning about how diseases evolved in medieval populations, and what society did to stem them — and how that might help us in the future. Our guests for this episode were Axel Christophersen, a professor of historical archaeology at the NTNU University Museum; Tom Gilbert, a professor at the NTNU University Museum and head of the Center for Evolutionarly Hologenomics based at the University of Copenhagen; and Elisabeth Forrestad Swensen, a PhD candidate at the NTNU University Museum. You can read more about the MedHeal research project on the project’s home page. Here are some of the academic…

The different species of Galapagos finches, with their specially evolved beaks that allow them to eat specific foods, helped Charles Darwin understand that organisms can evolve over time to better survive in their environment. Now, nearly 200 years later and thousands of miles away, biologists are learning some surprising lessons about evolution from northern Norwegian populations of the humble house sparrow (Passer domesticus). Darwin’s finches evolved on the exotic, volcanic Galapagos Islands. NTNU’s house sparrows are dispersed over a group of 18 islands in Helgeland, in an archipelago that straddles the Arctic Circle. Every summer since 1993, when NTNU Professor Bernt-Erik Sæther initiated the House Sparrow Project, a group of biologists has travelled to the islands collect data on the sparrows. They capture baby birds, measure different parts of their bodies, take a tiny blood sample, and then put a unique combination of coloured rings on their legs that help researchers identify the birds throughout…

Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we’ll make some! When the coronavirus first transformed from a weird respiratory disease centered in Wuhan, China to a global pandemic, no one was really prepared. Worldwide, no one had enough masks, personal protective gear and definitely — not enough tests. The problem was especially acute in places like Norway, a small country that had to compete on a global market to get anything and everything. What happened when a molecular biologist, some engineers and a couple of PhDs and postdocs put their heads together to design a completely different kind of coronavirus test — and how it changed lives in India, Denmark and Nepal. This last country was given coronavirus tests as NTNU’s annual Christmas gift, in coordination with a volunteer organization called NepalimedNorway. Our guests on today’s show are Magnar Bjørås, Sulalit Bandyopadhyay, Vegar Ottesen, Anuvansh Sharma and Tonje Steigedal. There's a transcript for today's show here. You can read more in detail about the…

Everyone knows there’s just too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and we’re heating up the planet at an unprecedented pace. More than 20 years ago, Norwegians helped pioneer an approach to dealing with CO2 that’s still ongoing today— they captured it and pumped it into a rock formation deep under the sea. Now the Norwegian government is building on those decades of experience with a large-scale carbon capture and storage project called Longship. Will it work? Is it safe? And is it something that other countries can benefit from, too? Our guests for this episode were Olav Bolland, Philip Ringrose and Mona Mølnvik. You can find the transcript of the episode here. More resources/reading: Olav Bolland’s book: Nord, Lars O.; Bolland, Olav. (2020) Carbon Dioxide Emission Management in Power Generation. Wiley-VCH Verlagsgesellschaft. 2020. ISBN 978-3-527-34753-7. You can read the White Paper from the Norwegian government about the Longship project here. Here’s a press release from 15 December 2020 that…

It’s no bigger than four decks of cards stacked one on top of the other — a tiny box raided from an Irish church. In Ireland, the box held the holy remains of a saint. What a mound of sand, some leftover nails and the box itself tell us about the Viking raiders who stole it — and what they did with it when they brought it back to Norway. Our guests for this episode were Aina Heen-Pettersen, a PhD candidate at NTNU, and Griffin Murray, who is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork. The reliquary itself is at NTNU’s University Museum in Trondheim. You can see it virtually if you register to view the museum’s Online Collections and search for “shrine”. A transcript of today’s show is available here. Here are some of the academic articles on the reliquary research: Heen-Pettersen, A. (2019). The Earliest Wave of Viking Activity? The Norwegian Evidence Revisited. European Journal of Archaeology, 22(4), 523-541. doi:10.1017/eaa.2019.19 Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen. (2018) Objects…

Krill eyeballs. The werewolf effect. Diel vertical migration. Arctic marine biologists really talk about these things. There’s a reason for that — when it comes to the polar night, when humans see only velvety darkness, krill eyeballs see things a little differently. And when the sun has been gone for months, during the darkest periods of the polar night, the moon does unexpected things to marine organisms. Learn more about what biologists are figuring out about the workings of the polar night — and what it means at a time when the Arctic is warming at a breakneck pace. Our guests for this episode were Jørgen Berge, Geir Johnsen, Laura Hobbs and Jonathan H. Cohen. You can see a transcript of the episode here. Fridtjof Nansen’s book about his Arctic expedition is called Farthest North. You can also read about the other influences his pioneering journey had on science here. You can also read about Geir Johnsen’s different research projects in a series of articles from Norwegian SciTech News. The findings of…

Ever wonder what's happening in some of the more far-flung places on the planet? In 63 Degrees North, we'll bring you stories from Norway every week about surprising science, little-known history, and technology and engineering discoveries that can help change the world. The first of five episodes drops February 1. Brought to you by NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.