63 Degrees North
Episodes
What babies can tell us – and why we need to listen
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you've ever seen an infant lying on its back, you've surely seen them endlessly waving their arms and legs in seemingly haphazard ways. And crying?...
ENCORE: When the doctor is out
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ENCORE: This episode was first published in Oct. 2023. Sierra Leone used to be the most dangerous place in the world to give birth. Without enough doc...
ENCORE: Running rats and healing hearts
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Oly...
Walrus tusks were Viking age gold
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have floated a half-dozen theories for why Viking Greenland settlements suddenly vanished in the 1300s and 1400s, after nearly 500 years of...
An accidental discovery: From failed experiment to new antibiotic
13 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
NTNU professor Marit Otterlei nearly threw out the contaminated cell culture where she and her colleagues were testing a new cancer drug.The problem a...
New clues from old bones: Norwegian Vikings were very, very violent
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Vik...
Old flames die hard – the saga of solar cookers
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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-powere...
From Running Rats to Brain Maps: A Nobel Odyssey
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Cathedral at the end of the world
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
ENCORE: Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
ENCORE: Old bones and modern germs
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode originally aired on Feb. 16, 2022.Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed ...
ENCORE: Shedding light on the polar night
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode originally aired on January 27, 2021.Krill eyeballs. The werewolf effect. Diel vertical migration. Arctic marine biologists really talk a...
Strange bedfellows: Howard Hughes, a $2 billion ship and a lost Soviet submarine
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 –...
Seabed mining – savior or scourge?
06 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Norway's Mid-Arctic Ocean Ridge is alive with underwater volcanic activity – where big towers called black smokers spew mineral-laden boiling hot wa...
Report from Dubai
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 mitigat...
When trees talk
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
1100 Norwegian teachers fought Hitler — and won
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 S...
Tea bags on the tundra
11 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
When the doctor is out
04 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Listening to Leviathans: Sounds from the deep
27 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Norwegian technology, courtesy of the 19th-century whaler Svend Foyn, played a critical role in establishing the modern era of industrial whaling.By t...
Running rats and healing hearts
20 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 id...
Wax, wood and CO2
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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: Scientist...
The EU has the strongest climate law in the world. But it's not enough.
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ser...
Getting to Net Zero
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 In...
The Alchemists: Turning wild water into white coal
13 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The secrets behind how Norwegian scientists and engineers harnessed the country’s wild waterfalls by developing super efficient turbines — and how...
The Detectives: Hunting toxic chemicals in the Arctic
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Baby grey seals. Polar bears. Zooplankton on painkillers. How do toxic chemicals and substances end up in Arctic animals — and as it happens, nativ...
Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How the unlikely combination of WWII Germany, a modest English engineer who created a worker’s paradise, an ambitious industrialist prosecuted as a ...
Pirates, noblewomen and bicycling housewives
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 too...
Old bones and modern germs
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed over decades of archaeological excavations. One ...
Darwin had Galapagos finches. Norway has… house sparrows?
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The different species of Galapagos finches, with their specially evolved beaks that allow them to eat specific foods, helped Charles Darwin understand...
Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we'll make them!
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we’ll make some! When the coronavirus first transformed from a weird respiratory disease centered in Wuh...
The Longship that could help save the planet
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone knows there’s just too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and we’re heating up the planet at an unprecedented pace. &nb...
Viking raiders stole this box. But the real surprise is what they did with it!
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 hol...
Shedding light — on the polar night
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Krill eyeballs. The werewolf effect. Diel vertical migration. Arctic marine biologists really talk about these things. There’s a reason for tha...
Sneak peak
20 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder what's happening in some of the more far-flung places on the planet? In 63 Degrees North, we'll bring you stories from Norway every week a...