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Every semester, CAS fellows are challenged to present their research to the other project groups at lunch-time seminars. For the pure mathematicians, having to explain their work to the uninitiated might be considered something of a challenge.

It’s the Olympic Games in Beijing and the heavy smog that usually fills the air of the capital and the lungs of its inhabitants has somehow lifted. Dedicated researchers are the people to thank for this reprieve.

After a comprehensive election process, the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS Oslo) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has the pleasure of announcing the three selected research projects for the 2018/19 academic year.

September 6, the Kavli Prize honors the 2016 Laureates for their seminal advances in Astrophysics, Nanoscience and Neuroscience. The program of the Kavli Week also facilitates for dialogues on significant research in the fields of Astrophysics, Nanoscience and Neuroscience

Three new research groups are settling in at CAS, and we are excited to present highly diverse and internationally composed research groups.

Bears increase their weight by fifty per cent during the autumn, and then they lie down to hibernate for six months. According to Professor Jon Swenson, who has been studying bears for over thirty years, a human who did this would never get up again. During our interview, Swenson explains why the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, is interested in his data on bears.

The CAS project on harvested large mammals is a significant example of how basic research can fruitfully, if unpredictably, enhance new knowledge across fields.

- We learnt from Kant that science has a tendency to go beyond its own limits, Professor Camilla Serck-Hanssen says. She is working on the oldest, most basic philosophical questions that to untrained minds might seem unanswerable. Together with Professor Frode Kjosavik she leads a metaphysical research project at CAS, pursuing questions that science cannot answer.