21: Seabed mining – savior or scourge?

Nations of the world are racing against the clock to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming. New and existing technologies – from electric cars to high-tech solar panels and wind turbines – hold the key to making the shift away from our fossil fueled lives. But making this shift requires the metals and minerals we need to build these technologies.

Enter deep sea mining. On January 9, the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, decided to open an area in the deep ocean that's roughly the size of Italy to exploration and mining. This area lies mostly in Arctic waters, and straddles the Mid-Arctic Ocean Ridge.

At the same time, biologists are beginning to learn about the diversity of previously unknown creatures living in the depths, under enormous water pressure and near water temperatures hot enough to melt plastic.

A look at the pros and cons of Norway's controversial – and first-in-the-world – decision to allow deep sea mining. Our guests on today's show are Mats Ingulstad, Egil Tjåland, Kurt Aasly and Torkild Bakken.

Read more: Episode 21 details | Episode 21 transcript

22: Strange bedfellows: Howard Hughes, a $2 billion ship and a lost Soviet submarine

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 this little sidebar to the history of deep sea mining, so here you have it.

Read more: Episode 22 details | Episode 22 transcript

23: ENCORE: Shedding light on the polar night

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.

Read more: Episode 23 details | Episode 23 transcript

24: ENCORE: Old bones and modern germs

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.

25: ENCORE: Herman Görings Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal

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.

26: Cathedral at the end of the world

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?

27: From Running Rats to Brain Maps

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 studying the disease. In fact, the KG Jebsen Centre for Alzheimer's Disease, a part of the Mosers' Kavli Institute, is working to bring these fundamental insights about the brain to clinical practice.