It’s easy to oppose solar parks when you hear that 60 solar plants are equivalent in area to over 5000 football pitches, as recently reported by NRK. This analogy draws attention away from other important aspects of the debate.
An ineffective negotiation system was the main impression people left with from the climate summit in Baku. Restoring trust in this system must be the top priority for the next conference.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for buildings is an effective tool for achieving climate targets. The requirements must now be followed up with policy in Norway as well.
It’s been a mystery for many years: Every day, tonnes of ferromanganese – an important additive in steel – are “locked” in slag on their way out of the furnaces. We are now getting close to solving this problem.
We throw away huge amounts of food. But would you change your behaviour if you knew the nutritional value of the food you waste?
A new earplug can now serve as hearing protection, a music player, and a microphone – all at once! At the heart of this technology is a MEMS chip developed at SINTEF in collaboration with Minuendo.
In the first week of summer, a dynamic team of robots, researchers, students, and engineers in SFI Harvest and AUR-Lab embarked on a mission to sample zooplankton off the coast of Mausund, Norway.
Mineral recovery by mining generates large volumes of surplus crushed rock that end up polluting natural environments. If we succeed in generating new knowledge, such surpluses can instead be used to manufacture concrete or improve agricultural soils.
If only techno-optimists get to test AI tools, the results simply aren’t good enough. This is where Tesla made a big mistake – a lesson that the health sector will do well to learn.
Shortfalls in crew numbers in the Norwegian ferry system are resulting in numerous cancelled crossings. Onshore control centres and new safety technologies are just some of the initiatives that may enable operations with smaller crews.
By imitating nature, it may be possible to recover seabed minerals by extracting hot water from the Earth’s crust. We can harvest green energy and be sensitive to the environment – all at the same time.
Norwegian politicians should not be sponsoring the race to expand the use of AI. The process is wasting too much energy.
Women’s bodies and their health in general have for too long been assigned low priority in the field of research. But an innovative and extraordinary technology may now offer us new treatments for conditions such as endometriosis.
Does it matter if a small area of rare wetland is lost if a lot more of the same area remains intact? In Norway, it is impossible to say, because no-one can show how many such wetlands are being destroyed elsewhere at the same time.
Did you know that the chemical industry supplies products to virtually all other value chains, including the food, construction, health and transport sectors? All these industries are now having to renew themselves as part of the green transition, and SINTEF is working to help them.
If the Norwegian government rejects the majority opinion of the Gene Technology Committee, it will miss a long overdue opportunity to boost food safety, improve animal welfare and promote more eco-friendly pesticides.
One of Norway’s biggest achievements to date in the practical application of artificial intelligence is in identifying bone fractures. The secret of this success may be of benefit to many of our business leaders.
The Norwegian government has decided to phase out the country’s Regional Research Funds. This is incomprehensible to those of us who have watched this initiative function successfully as a springboard for green innovation and transition in many small businesses.
Match load in international football is becoming so high that it is threatening the health of our players. So much so, that the product itself may also be under threat.
Necessary reductions in greenhouse gases will be achieved too late if we have to wait for all our aircraft, ships and trains to transition from fossil fuels. This is why we need biofuels – in spite of the criticisms levelled at their use in a recent article published on the opinions website ‘NRK Ytring’. Biofuels are no ‘climate change mitigation ruse’, as these authors would have you believe.
The electricity grid in Norway needs more balancing power. Neighbourhood communities can help by participating in a new market where intelligent consumer planning enables them to save money.
Energy efficiency measures in buildings can offer Norway a three-fold benefit – by contributing to avoiding an energy deficit and high electricity prices, and to achieving its stated climate change mitigation targets for 2030 and 2050.
Groundbreaking projects funded by Norway demonstrate that foreign aid can help to combat both poverty and environmental problems. One result is that uncontrolled plastic waste may become a resource for the cement industry.
If artificial intelligence (AI) is to offer us the societal benefits that many people are dreaming of and believe in, we need to develop technologies that are a lot smarter than those we have today.
It is not enough simply to target aid efforts at the poorest. We also have to combat discrimination and inequality both within and between countries.
It is essential to speed up electrification of the Norwegian heavy transport sector. We believe that this is possible in spite of full capacity utilisation in the electricity grid. Here are our three recommendations.
Every organism needs to breathe – including cells that we use in in vitro microphysiological systems. We now have promising results with a material that enhances the quality of our experiments.
Fish faeces and residual feed recovered from salmon hatcheries may soon become a sustainable product. The salmon farming sector will be crying out for a solution to the forecast ‘feed squeeze’.
Recent data on people’s habits in the workplace are giving us reason to look into whether the use of artificial intelligence (AI) may be hampering collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Plant managers used to be kept awake at night by the fear of unintended incidents. But their new nightmares are much worse.
Norwegian hydrogen research laboratories have recently been celebrating breakthroughs that can help heavy industry to achieve climate neutrality. But current Norwegian government policy means that these findings will most likely only benefit our competitors.
A huge amount of the knowledge we acquire about our work cannot be expressed either digitally or on paper. Children ought to be made aware of this as early as in primary school, because this tacit knowledge is in danger of dying out.
