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 U,et al. Superior cardiovascular effect of aerobic interval training versus moderate continuous training in heart failure patients: a randomized study. Circulation. 2007 Jun 19;115(24):3086-94. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.675041. Epub 2007 Jun 4.
• Rognmo, Ø et al.. Cardiovascular Risk of High- Versus Moderate-Intensity Aerobic Exercise in Coronary Heart Disease Patients Circulation. 2012;126:1436-1440. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.112.123117
• Stensvold D, Viken H, Steinshamn S L, Dalen H, Støylen A, Loennechen J P et al. Effect of exercise training for five years on all cause mortality in older adults—the Generation 100 study: randomised controlled trial BMJ 2020; 371 :m3485 
• Tari AR, Nauman J, Zisko N, Skjellegrind HK, Bosnes I, Bergh S, Stensvold D, Selbæk G, Wisløff U. Temporal changes in cardiorespiratory fitness and risk of dementia incidence and mortality: a population-based prospective cohort study. Lancet Public Health. 2019 Nov;4(11):e565-e574.
• Tari AR, Berg HH, Videm V, Bråthen G, White LR, Røsbjørgen RN, Scheffler K, Dalen H, Holte E, Haberg AK, Selbaek G, Lydersen S, Duezel E, Bergh S, Logan-Halvorsrud KR, Sando SB, Wisløff U. Safety and efficacy of plasma transfusion from exercise-trained donors in patients with early Alzheimer's disease: protocol for the ExPlas study. BMJ Open. 2022 Sep 6;12(9):e056964.

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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 about the future of walruses in a warming world.

My guests on today's show are James Barrett, professor of medieval and environmental archaeology at the NTNU University Museum, and Katrien Dierickx and Erin Kunisch, postdocs with James and the 4-Oceans project.

Here's a link to the NTNU University Museum's new exhibit on the walrus tusk trade, Sea Ivories. The exhibition includes the Wingfield-Digby Crozier, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, plus several Lewis Chessmen, from the British Museum.

Here's a link to photos and a description of a Romanesque walrus ivory carving, the Cloisters Cross. Here's a link to a Gothic-style carving of elephant ivory.

Here are some relevant academic articles:

Barrett, James; Boessenkool, Sanne; Kneale, Catherine; O'Connell, Tamsin C; Star, Bastiaan. (2020) Ecological globalisation, serial depletion and the medieval trade of walrus rostra. Quaternary Science Reviews

Barrett, James; Khamaiko, Natalia; Ferrari, Giada; Cuevas, Angelica; Kneale, Catherine; Hufthammer, Anne Karin. (2022) Walruses on the Dnieper: new evidence for the intercontinental trade of Greenlandic ivory in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences

Keighley, X et al.Disappearance of Icelandic Walruses Coincided with Norse Settlement, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 36:12, Dec.2019, p2656–2667, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz196

Transcript

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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 deep curiosity about the nuts and bolts of how life actually works, can come up with startling discoveries that may someday save our lives. Sometimes, the key to saving lives can be hidden in a protein that hasn't changed much over billions of years.

Our guests on today's show are Marit Otterlei, a professor at NTNU's Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine; Siril Skaret Bakke, innovation manager at NTNU's Technology Transfer Office AS, and Christine Årdal , senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Marit is a part-time CSO at APIM Therapeutics (https://www.apimtherapeutics.com/), which is developing the cancer drug that she was testing back in 2011, when an open window on a hot summer day led her to suspect that her substance might a possible antibiotic, too. That antibiotic, Betatide, is now undergoing testing that pharmaceutical companies require before investing in it.

Here's a list of some of the key academic publications:

Gilljam, Karin Margaretha; Feyzi, Emadoldin; Aas, Per Arne; Sousa, Mirta; Müller, Rebekka; Vågbø, Cathrine Broberg. (2009) Identification of a novel, widespread, and functionally important PCNA-binding motif. Journal of Cell Biology

Nedal, Aina; Ræder, Synnøve Brandt; Dalhus, Bjørn; Helgesen, Emily; Forstrøm, Rune Johansen; Lindland, Kim. (2020) Peptides containing the PCNA interacting motif APIM bind to the beta-clamp and inhibit bacterial growth and mutagenesis. Nucleic Acids Research (NAR)

Nepal, Anala; Ræder, Synnøve Brandt; Søgaard, Caroline Krogh; Haugan, Maria Schei; Otterlei, Marit. (2021) Broad-Spectrum Antibacterial Peptide Kills Extracellular and Intracellular Bacteria Without Affecting Epithelialization. Frontiers in Microbiology

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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:

• Jan Bill, David Jacobson, Susanne Nagel, Lisa Mariann Strand (2024)

Violence as a lens to Viking societies: A comparison of Norway and Denmark,

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,Volume 75, 2024, 101605, ISSN 0278-4165, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101605

• Lisa Mariann Strand, Sam Leggett, Birgitte Skar Multi-isotope variation reveals social complexity in Viking Age Norway, iScience, Volume 25, Issue 10, 2022, 105225,

ISSN 2589-0042, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105225.

• Margaryan, A., Lawson, D.J., Sikora, M. et al. Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature 585, 390–396 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8

Questions? Comments? You can contact me at [email protected]

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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% continue to rely on these resources for cooking.

Clearly, cooking with wood is bad. It wastes women and children's time as they scavenge scarce wood to burn.

It contributes to deforestation. It's a huge problem that seems like it should be solvable with enough smart engineering, yet it persists.

Today's episode explores the successes and challenges researchers have faced in tackling this issue.

My guests are Jimmy Chaciga, Ashmore Mawire and Ole Jørgen Nydal.

You can see videos and documents from the International Energy Agency's Clean Cooking Summit from May 2024 here.

Here are some publications describing some of the work in today's show:

• Chaciga, Jimmy; Nyeinga, Karidewa; Okello, Denis; Nydal, Ole Jørgen. (2024) Design and experimental analysis on a single tank energy storage system integrated with a cooking unit using funnel system. Journal of Energy Storage
• Nydal, Ole Jørgen. (2023) Heat Storage for Cooking: A Discussion on Requirements and Concepts. Energies
• Cooking with solar ovens in sub-Saharan Africa, Norwegian SciTech News

Here are some background documents that describe the problem over time:

• Joseph Elasu, et al.(2023) Drivers of household transition to clean energy fuels: A systematic review of evidence,

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition.

• World Bank. (2011). Household Cookstoves, Environment, Health, and Climate Change: A New Look at an Old Problem. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Ideas? Feedback? Email me at [email protected]

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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.

This episode is a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Nobel award.

To make it, I cracked open a time capsule of sorts: When the Mosers first learned that they had won the scientific world's highest honour, I ran down to their lab and recorded everything! The files in this podcast are from that day and the heady days afterwards.

My guests on today's episode are May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.

You can also find lots more material, including videos, more popular science articles and background information on this webpage.

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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: Thousand-year-old cathedral surrenders its secrets, stone by stone

• Øystein Ekroll has an article about the building history of the cathedral from 1030 to 1537 that you can find here.
• Øystein's PhD dissertation is available here: The Octagonal Shrine Chapel of St Olav at Nidaros Cathedral
• Øystein and Margrete have also edited a book about the cathedral:

Andås, Margrete Syrstad, Øystein Ekroll Andreas Haug and Nils Holger Petersen, eds,

The Medieval Cathedral of Trondheim: Architectural and Ritual Constructions in their European Context

(Traditions and Transformations 3), Turnhout, Brepols, 2007

• Andås, Margrete Syrstad. “Art and Ritual in the Liminal Zone.” In he Medieval cathedral of Trondheim : architectural and ritual constructions in their European context. Eds. Margrete Syrstad Andås, Øystein Ekroll, Andreas Haug and Nils Holger Petersen. Turnhout 2007: 47–126.
• Andås, Margrete Syrstad. ”The Octagon Doorway: A Question of Purity and Danger?” In Ornament and Order. Essays on Viking and Northern Medieval Art for Signe Horn Fuglesang. Edited by Margrethe C.Stang and Kristin B. Aavitsland, 97-134. Trondheim: Tapir, 2008.

Like what you're hearing? Leave a review, tell your friends, subscribe! And you can contact me, Nancy Bazilchuk, with feedback at [email protected]

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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

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, Hans Otto. (2007) The Norwegian Aluminium Expansion Program in the Context of European integration, 1955-1975. Cahiers d'histoire de l'aluminium.

Gendron, Robin S.; Ingulstad, Mats; Storli, Espen. (2013) Aluminum Ore: The Political Economy of the Global Bauxite Industry. University of British Columbia Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-7748-2533-7.

Like the show? Have questions? Contact me, Nancy Bazilchuk, at [email protected]

You can find the transcript for the show here.

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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 some of the academic articles on medieval Trondheim related to the podcast:

Zhou Z, Lundstrøm I, Tran-Dien A, Duchêne S, Alikhan NF, Sergeant MJ, Langridge G, Fotakis AK, Nair S, Stenøien HK, Hamre SS, Casjens S, Christophersen A, Quince C, Thomson NR, Weill FX, Ho SYW, Gilbert MTP, Achtman M. Pan-genome Analysis of Ancient and Modern Salmonella enterica Demonstrates Genomic Stability of the Invasive Para C Lineage for Millennia. Curr Biol. 2018 Aug 6;28(15):2420-2428.

Stian Suppersberger Hamre, Valérie Daux- Stable oxygen isotope evidence for mobility in medieval and post-medieval Trondheim, Norway,

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Vol. 8, 2016, pp 416-425,

 A transcript of the show is available here.

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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 articles from Norwegian SciTech News. 

The findings of the polar night team are so surprising that they actually wrote a textbook about it, edited by Jørgen Berge, Geir Johnsen and Jonathan H. Cohen. The book is titled Polar Night Marine Ecology: Life and Light in the Dead of Night.

Here are some of the polar night research articles:

Berge, J., Renaud, P. E., Darnis, G. et al. (2015) In the dark: A review of ecosystem processes during the Arctic polar night. Progress in Oceanography, 139: 258-271 

Ludvigsen, M., Berge, J., Geoffroy, M. et al. (2018) Use of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle reveals small-scale diel vertical migrations of zooplankton and susceptibility to light pollution under low solar irradiance. Science Advances 4: eaap9887

 Hobbs L, Cottier FR, Last KS, Berge J (2018) Pan-Arctic diel vertical migration during the polar night. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 605:61-72. 

Berge, Jørgen; Geoffroy, Maxime; Daase, Malin; Cottier, et al.(2020) Artificial light during the polar night disrupts Arctic fish and zooplankton behavior down to 200 m depth. Communications Biology. 3 (102),  10.1038/s42003-020-0807-6

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