News and Blog

After a one-year delay in our fieldwork due to COVID-19, we are finally getting ready to get back to the Arctic!

For the last two years, we have been running an experiment in a climate room in the basement of the Biology building at the University of Oslo, investigating the effect of an insecticide (clothianidin from the group neonicotinoids) on bumblebees, as a part of the research project NEOPOLL

Our research group attended the Norwegian Environmental Toxicology Symposium (NETS) conference earlier this month, and the group was represented in several sections of the meeting!

In a new publication, our former master student Helene Thorstensen compared concentrations of legacy persistent organic pollutants (POPs), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), and Mercury (Hg) in blood and eggs of the herring gull and common eider to assess their roles as contaminant monitoring species in urban environments.

Our group member Clare Andvik’s master thesis looked at the differences in pollutants between seal and fish-eating killer whales. We are excited that the results have now been published in the journal Scientific Reports!

In collaboration with the UiO Department of Biosciences and the UiO science library, VEGA scene is showing the 2019 film Dark Waters throughout June. 

With the start of the new MULTICOP project, two new, but at the same time old members join our group - Torben Lode and Jan Heuschele. 

In these unusual and worrying times of the corona pandemic, most of us are staying safe in our own home in solidarity with each other. We in the research group, at least, are lucky to be able to work from home. While we wait for the virus spread to decline, it might be in need to think about something else between news updates. We therefore below shamelessly recommend some radio podcasts involving group members from relatively recent times. OBS! These radio shows are all in Norwegian, unfortunately!  

The spread of coronavirus has led to a lot of changes in our research group over the last week. As we are getting used to a new normal, our priority is keeping ourselves and the people around us healthy and safe.

The Norwegian Environmental Agency (Miljødirektoratet) has in a recent report to the Ministry of Environment suggested several measures to deal with the illegal transport of used electronics and Electronic waste (E-waste) from Norway. The E-waste topic was also central during the workshop “Pollution: Monitoring and Policy” organized by members of the AnthroTox project during the Oslo Life Science Conference held earlier this spring. Participants as well as the organizers of the workshop learned how international regulations on pollutants, e.g. the Stockholm and Basel Convention, are followed up in Tanzania and Norway.

An important part of doing research is to communicate our knowledge to a wider audience, and therefore we are happy to be able to participate at public events where we get the chance to meet people and share our work.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 global goals, set to ensure a sustainable future for everyone. The goals are intended to be achieved by 2030, which means that this is the decade for action, and that was the main message at this year’s SDG Conference in Bergen. This national conference gathers people working with sustainability from all parts of society: politicians, businesses, entrepreneurs and of course academics from every discipline. Our group member, Clare, joined the conference as a part of the University of Oslo delegation, and was one of few biologists attending...

Our blog activity is expected to increase in 2020 (weekly updates!), and we are also now on twitter: @BorgaGroup! 

Erik Bjørnstad Engblad from the Department of Social Sciences has written a nice article about AntroTox and our interdisciplinary, and currently also very relevant, work. Read here (in Norwegian) about the anthropological fieldwork of Samwel Moses Ntapanta in Tanzania, Maja Nipens work at the Deparment of Chemistry, my work here at the Department of Biosciences, and how we fulfil each other with different focus and expertise!