Centre for Advanced Study

at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

  • Bears have solved some major problems in modern medicine, Professor Jon Swenson says, explaining that CNES, the French space agency, is interested in bear research because bears do not suffer from diseases relating to inactivity, but humans do. For humans involved in space travel, of course, the problem of inactivity is one that requires long-term study. Photograph: Shutterstock

    - Bears have solved major problems of modern medicine

    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.

  • Close up picture of a brown bear Photo: Shutterstock

    - Humans, not climate, cause extinction

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

  • Filosofene Camilla Serck-Hansen og Frode Kjosavik

    Beyond the limits of science

    'We learnt from Kant that science has a tendency to go beyond its own limits', Professor Camilla Serck-Hanssen says. She and Professor Frode Kjosavik lead a CAS project about the oldest, most basic philosophical questions that to untrained minds might seem unanswerable.

  • Professor Robert Losey analyzes dog skeletons in Siberia. Professor Losey is part of the CAS project Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene.

    Dogs and humans' long-lasting relationship

  • Reindeer Norway Arctic

    Sense a different Arctic

    In the exhibition NyArktis, CAS researchers challenge portrayals of the Arctic as bare and without human’s presence, and experiment in new ways of presenting the region.

  • "An engaging love letter to ethnography"

    In The Times Literary Supplement CAS group leader Professor Marianne Lien's book Becoming Salmon, Aquaculture and the domestication of a fish is described as «...a masterly ethnographic study of mankind’s relationship with farmed fish».

  • Scientific Director at The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in Oslo, Professor Vigdis Broch-Due, and Postdoc Margit Ystanes recently published the book Trusting and its Tribulations: Interdisciplinary engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust

    Book release: challenging the conventional wisdom about trust

    Scientific Director at CAS, Professor Vigdis Broch-Due, and colleague Postdoc Margit Ystanes want to introduce the complexities of trust in a debate they criticise as ethnocentric, abstract and limited.

  • Exhibition NyArktis by CAS researchers

    NRK radio interview with CAS researchers

    Listen to a radio interview with the CAS researchers behind the exhibition NyArktis, project leader Gro Ween and CAS group leader Professor Marianne Lien.

  • New book by CAS fellow Gisli Palsson and Margaret Lock: Can science resolve the nature/nurture debate?

    Nature/Nurture: a never-ending debate

    – Downplaying the environment, epigenetics may reinforce the nature/nurture divide it is set to challenge, CAS fellow Professor Gisli Palsson argues as he publishes the book "Can science resolve the nature/nurture debate?".

  • Exhibition NyArktis by CAS researchers

    Exhibition: sense a different Arctic

    In the exhibition “NyArktis”, CAS researchers challenge portrayals of the Arctic as bare and without human’s presence, and experiment in new ways of presenting the region.

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