High North: Norway's Highest Priority

From the Norway Post comes this account of an additional NOK 530 million in spending for High North initiatives in the 2010 budget proposal. The extra money is targeted toward "value creation, knowledge-building and the environment."

The article doesn't mention the total expenses related to the High North strategy or what percentage increase the extra funds might represent.

Regarding science and engineering, marine bioprospecting is said to get NOK 19 million, and NOK 17 million will fund the creation of a Tromsø-based center for climate and environment. The big winner, though, is "space-related activities," slated for NOK 126 million in new money. The millions will help improve satellite navigation in the region. Overall, however, science funding is small beside the NOK 300 million designated for international cooperation.

The High North remains important
by Rolleiv Solholm
(14 October 2009) -- The High North remains the Government’s most important strategic priority area. In the National budget, a record increase in funding by about NOK 530 million has therefore been proposed for a range of measures in the High North in 2010. “This is a project with a time horizon of generations. Since 2006 we have increased funding for our efforts in the High North by more than NOK 1.5 billion, and with these allocations we have made substantial progress,” Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre commented.

Link to full article: http://www.norwaypost.no/content/view/22625/26/

Hunting Arctic Asteroid Impact With Hovercraft

This is a nifty bit of self-funded science (those trust funds come in handy!) that involves mapping the arctic sea floor from atop a customized hovercraft. Yngve Kristofferson from the University of Bergen is one of the two principal scientists involved.

by Alexis Madrigal
Wired.com (12 October 2009) -- Two polar scientists hot on the trail of an arctic mystery have a new tool for exploration: a hovercraft, specially outfitted for week-long trips over the ice with scientific instruments and solar panels.

Their quarry is a nearly 22,000 square-mile patch of disturbed Arctic sea floor that could be evidence of a massive asteroid strike. John Hall, a now-retired geoscientist, discovered the anomaly during his late-’60s graduate work aboard Fletcher’s Ice Island, a huge berg U.S. scientists inhabited for several decades.

Since then, no scientific vessel has been back over the area to collect more data. The massive icebreakers that have crunched through the Arctic since the 1990s can’t reach the spot, said Yngve Kristofferson, a scientist and explorer at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Kristofferson became intrigued with Hall’s data and in 2004, the two of them met in Bergen to talk Arctic science from eight in the morning to 10 in the evening. At the end of their time together, they came to a decision: They needed a hovercraft.

link to full article

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Love Systems Fourth visit to Oslo

Ignore the awkward translation. This article shows the quintessentially Norwegian fascination with social science through a lens of tabloid-style adolescence.

from the blog Eye Candy Solutions
(originally published in Aftenposten's weekend magazine)

Saturday, Oslo centrum:
To summer dressed girls strolls toward Grensen. A dark haired guy at 165 cm stands at a few meters distance and scouts behind dark sun glasses. He catches a glimpse of the blondes and doesn’t hesitate. With steady steps he follows them. When he reaches the side of the blondest one of the girls, he touches her arm gently and says: “I saw you from across the street, and you were so gorgeous that I just had to come over and talk to you. Hi, I’m Jim!” He reaches out his hand. She takes it and giggles somewhat shy. After five minutes of dialogue, laughter and heavy eyeballing her number is saved on Jim Stark’s phone. What really happened?

“I don’t really understand it myself”, Sigrid Meland (18) says. “He seemed so confident and nice at the same time. I simply got a bit charmed. It’s not every day you experience something like that in Oslo. Norwegian boys are so shy”, she adds. Meland has just been exposed to one of the world’s best professional pickup-artist. 27 year old Australian Jim Stark, or Mr. M as he’s better known as within the pickup community, has demonstrated what he calls “daygaming” and “number-close” to A-Magasinet. This means to pick up girls during the daytime with the goal of getting a phone number and a date later on. The former lawyer is so good at this and other pickup techniques that American company Love Systems pay him over a million a year to travel around the world and teach his seduction techniques to other men. He was recently in Norway for the third time. Also in this country there are more and more men who want to learn pickup through science and tested methods.

http://sandyeyecandy.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/love-systems-forth-visit-to-oslo/#comment-30

Testing instruments for ExoMars and Mars Science Laboratory

Svalbard not a bad proxy for Mars, it seems.

AMASE 2009 (October 7, 2009) -- How can we be sure that instruments that will be sent on future Martian missions will work properly? How do we know that they will obtain accurate and precise measurements? How will we be able to compare the data to what we have seen on our planet? The answer is easy: by testing, testing and again testing them during field trips on Earth. This has been one of the most important goals of AMASE 2009.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=32549

Human Brain, Like Google Maps, Creates Multiple Independent Maps While Finding The Way In Physical World

ScienceDaily (2009-10-07) -- Through the power of Google Earth, you can travel the globe from the comfort of your computer screen, peering down on everything from above. But once you change your perspective -- if you go into one of the buildings that you've looked down on -- you have to upload a new map. Now, researchers in Norway have discovered that the brain also creates multiple independent maps while finding the way in the physical world.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007081528.htm#