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 ...
Jul 10, 2025•30 min•Season 5Ep. 31
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 lo...
Jun 13, 2025•28 min•Season 5Ep. 30
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...
Apr 15, 2025•31 min•Season 5Ep. 29
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...
Feb 14, 2025•21 min•Season 5Ep. 28
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 tha...
Nov 26, 2024•38 min•Season 4Ep. 27
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 Trondhe...
Aug 08, 2024•26 min•Season 4Ep. 26
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 Bran...
Jul 25, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 25
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 population...
Jun 26, 2024•26 min•Season 4Ep. 24
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 f...
May 31, 2024•25 min•Season 4Ep. 23
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 19...
Mar 21, 2024•19 min•Season 4Ep. 22
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 , E...
Feb 06, 2024•28 min•Season 4Ep. 21
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...
Dec 13, 2023•13 min•Season 3Ep. 20
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 her...
Nov 01, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 19
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 N...
Oct 18, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 18
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 ...
Oct 11, 2023•31 min•Season 3Ep. 17
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 , A...
Oct 04, 2023•34 min•Season 3Ep. 16
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 deployin...
Sep 27, 2023•31 min•Season 3Ep. 15
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 Bab...
Sep 20, 2023•34 min•Season 3Ep. 14
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 ...
Nov 15, 2022•25 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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...
Nov 07, 2022•19 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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 ...
Jun 02, 2022•22 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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 w...
Apr 13, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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 Øverjordet, a researcher at SINTEF. One of the most useful websites on arctic pollution is the Arctic M...
Mar 30, 2022•24 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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...
Mar 16, 2022•28 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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 a...
Mar 02, 2022•32 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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 t...
Feb 16, 2022•26 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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 Island...
Feb 26, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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 a...
Feb 19, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 4
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 somethin...
Feb 11, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 3
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 Unive...
Feb 04, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 2
