63 Degrees North

Nov 26 2024 28 ep. 26 mins 100
63 Degrees North Podcast artwork

We bring you surprising stories of science, history and innovation from 63 Degrees North, the home of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Listen as we explore the mysteries of the polar night, the history of Viking raiders, and how geologists and engineers are working to save the planet, one carbon dioxide molecule at a time — and more. Take a journey to Europe's outer edge for fascinating tales and remarkable discoveries.
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From Running Rats to Brain Maps: A Nobel Odyssey

Nov 26 2024 37 mins  
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 C

Cathedral at the end of the world

Aug 08 2024 25 mins  
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 scul

ENCORE: Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal

Jul 25 2024 29 mins  
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 personalit

ENCORE: Old bones and modern germs

Jun 26 2024 26 mins  
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

ENCORE: Shedding light on the polar night

May 31 2024 24 mins  
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 dar

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

Mar 21 2024 18 mins  
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

Seabed mining – savior or scourge?

Feb 06 2024 28 mins  
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

Report from Dubai

Dec 13 2023 12 mins  
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 t

When trees talk

Nov 01 2023 29 mins  
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 war

1100 Norwegian teachers fought Hitler — and won

Oct 17 2023 36 mins  
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.Vid