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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 and Professor Frode Kjosavik lead a CAS project about the oldest, most basic philosophical questions that to untrained minds might seem unanswerable.

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.

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 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.

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

– 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?".