63 Degrees North

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 and a couple of PhDs and postdocs put their heads together to design a completely different kind of coronavirus test — and how it changed lives in India, Denmark and Nepal. This last country was given coronavirus tests as NTNU’s annual Christmas gift, in coordination with a volunteer organization called NepalimedNorway.

Our guests on today’s show are Magnar Bjørås, Sulalit Bandyopadhyay, Vegar Ottesen, Anuvansh Sharma and Tonje Steigedal.

There's a transcript for today's show here.

You can read more in detail about the tests here: https://www.ntnu.edu/ntnu-covid-19-test

And here is a list of articles from NTNU and SINTEF’s online research magazine, Norwegian SciTech News:

NTNU’s new COVID-19 test to be used in India and Denmark

NTNU establishes a factory to produce coronavirus tests

From thousands of tiny balls to 150,000 tests per week

This episode was written, recorded, edited and produced by Nancy Bazilchuk. Sound design and editorial assistance from Randi Lillealtern at Historiebruket.

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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 University College Cork.

The reliquary itself is at NTNU’s University Museum in Trondheim. You can see it virtually if you register to view the museum’s Online Collections and search for “shrine”.

A transcript of today’s show is available here.

Here are some of the academic articles on the reliquary research:

Heen-Pettersen, A. (2019). The Earliest Wave of Viking Activity? The Norwegian Evidence Revisited. European Journal of Archaeology, 22 (4), 523-541. doi:10.1017/eaa.2019.19

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen. (2018) Objects from a distant place: transformation and use of Insular mounts from Viking-Age burials in Trøndelag, Central Norway. Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History. vol. 21.

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen; Murray, Griffin. (2018) An Insular Reliquary from Melhus: The Significance of Insular Ecclesiastical Material in Early Viking- Age Norway. Medieval Archaeology. vol. 62 (1).

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen. (2014) Insular artefacts from Viking-Age burials from mid-Norway. A review of contact between Trøndelag and Britain and Ireland. Internet Archaeology. vol. 38.

And here are the books that are mentioned in the podcast:

Brunning, S. (2019). The Sword in Early Medieval Northern Europe: Experience, Identity, Representation. Boydell & Brewer. doi:10.1017/9781787444560

Etting, V. (2013) The Story of the Drinking Horn: Drinking Culture in Scandinavia During the Middle Ages

Volume 21 of Publications from the National Museum / Studies in archaeology & history: Publications from the National Museum, ISSN 0909-9506

Lowenthal, D. (2015). The Past is a Foreign Country — Revisited. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139024884

A transcript of today’s show is available here.

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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 Islands. NTNU’s house sparrows are dispersed over a group of 18 islands in Helgeland, in an archipelago that straddles the Arctic Circle.

Every summer since 1993, when NTNU Professor Bernt-Erik Sæther initiated the House Sparrow Project, a group of biologists has travelled to the islands collect data on the sparrows. They capture baby birds, measure different parts of their bodies, take a tiny blood sample, and then put a unique combination of coloured rings on their legs that help researchers identify the birds throughout their lifetime.

Those decades of research have given researchers information that can be helpful in managing threatened and endangered species. They have also done some experiments where they made evolution happen in real time — and then watched what happened when they let nature run its course.

And then there was the series of experiments where they learned more than you might want to know about sparrow dating preferences, and about rogue sparrow fathers who court exhausted sparrow mothers — and then fathered children with the cute little she-bird next door.

Our guests for today’s show were Henrik Jensen, Thor Harald Ringsby and Stefanie Muff.

You can find a transcript of the show here.

Selected academic and popular science articles:

From NTNU’s online research magazine, Norwegian SciTech News:

Why aren’t house sparrows as big as geese?

Inbreeding detrimental for survival

Why house sparrows lay big and small eggs

On Darwin

Darwin, Charles (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray.

Weiner, J. (2014). The beak of the finch: A story of evolution in our time. Random House.

Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 1-53.

Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin's conversion: the Beagle voyage and its aftermath. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 325-396.

Academic articles from the House Sparrow Project:

• Araya-Ajoy, Yimen; Ranke, Peter Sjolte; Kvalnes, Thomas; Rønning, Bernt; Holand, Håkon; Myhre, Ane Marlene; Pärn, Henrik; Jensen, Henrik; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Sæther, Bernt-Erik; Wright, Jonathan. (2019) Characterizing morphological (co)variation using structural equation models: Body size, allometric relationships and evolvability in a house sparrow metapopulation. Evolution. vol. 73 (3).
• Kvalnes, Thomas; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Hagen, Ingerid Julie; Rønning, Bernt; Pärn, Henrik; Holand, Håkon; Engen, Steinar; Sæther, Bernt-Erik. (2017) Reversal of response to artificial selection on body size in a wild passerine bird. Evolution. vol. 71 (8).
• Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Pärn, Henrik; Kvalnes, Thomas; Boner, Winnie; Gillespie, Robert; Holand, Hå...

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 scientific articles describing the polar night research:

Berge, J., Båtnes, A.S., Johnsen, G. et a. (2012) Bioluminescence in the high Arctic during the polar night. Mar Biol 159: 231-237

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

Berge, J., Daase, M., Renaud, P.E. et al. (2015) Unexpected Levels of Biological Activity during the Polar Night Offer New Perspectives on a Warming Arctic Current Biology,

25, 2555-2561.

Cohen J.H., Berge J., Moline M.A. et al. (2015) Is Ambient Light during the High Arctic Polar Night Sufficient to Act as a Visual Cue for Zooplankton? PLoS ONE 10(6): e0126247. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0126247

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, Finlo Robert; Priou, Pierre; Cohen, Jonathan H.; Johnsen, Geir; McKee, David; Kostakis, Ina; Renaud, Paul Eric; Vogedes, Daniel Ludwig; Anderson, Philip J.; Last, Kim S.; Gauthier, Stephane. (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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