63 Degrees North

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, J on 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 Øve...

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 , whi...

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. Ou...

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 pl...

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 hum...

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 com...

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...

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-Pette...

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...

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...