Day: March 5, 2019

Last month’s visit by roaming polar bears that put a Russian village on lockdown may be just the beginning.

For as Moscow steps up its activity in the warming Arctic, conflict with the rare species is likely to increase.

More than 50 bears approached Belyushya Guba, a village on the far northern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, in February. As many as 10 of them explored the streets and entered buildings.

Local authorities declared a state of emergency for a week and appealed for help from Moscow.

Photos of the incident went viral, with some observers blaming officials for ignoring a sprawling garbage dump nearby where the animals feasted on food waste.

But polar bear experts say the main reason the Arctic predators came so close to humans was the late freezing of the sea. It was this that kept them from hunting seals and sent them looking for alternate food sources.

And as Russia increases its footprint in the Arctic, pursuing energy projects, Northern Passage navigation and strategic military interests, experts expect more clashes between humans and bears.

“Development in the Arctic will definitely increase conflict with humans, especially now that the polar bear is losing its life platform in several regions and coming ashore,” said biologist Anatoly Kochnev, who has studied polar bears in the eastern Arctic since the 1980s.

World’s fastest-melting ice

Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago of two islands between the Kara and Barents seas, is a good example of Moscow’s new frontier that falls inside the polar bear habitat.

Bears in the Barents Sea are seeing the fastest ice reduction of the species’ range, having lost 20 weeks of ice a year over the last few decades, according to Polar Bears International.

“Ice monitoring shows that previously, ice near Belushya Guba formed in December,” said Ilya Mordvintsev from the Severtsov Institute in Moscow, who was in a group of scientists flown out to aid the village.

“For thousands of years, they migrated this time of year to hunt seals. This year they came to the shore and there was no ice.”

Since the incident, ice has formed and the bears have left land to hunt, he said. “But it’s impossible to rule out a repeat of the situation in the coming years.”

And as more humans come to Novaya Zemlya, the likelihood of human-bear conflict increases.

A Soviet-era nuclear weapons testing site, Novaya Zemlya remains a restricted territory. But following a post-Soviet hiatus, the military has put up new buildings and an aerodrome.

A new port is under construction, in tandem with imminent plans to mine the giant Pavlovskoye lead and zinc deposit.

New contingents of military police were deployed to Belushya Guba in 2018. The community, which has schools and a large sports complex for military families, numbers over 2,000 people.

Soldiers vs bears 

Kochnev remembers the damage caused by Soviet missile defense personnel previously stationed on the east Arctic’s Wrangel Island.

In 1991, soldiers drove an axe into the head of a polar bear after it had got used to feeding on discarded scraps and become aggressive. Biologists from the island’s nature reserve never found the injured animal, he said.

“When they left a year later, we were relieved. Only reserve staff remained, who knew how to behave around bears,” he said. “But now it’s all starting again.”

Moscow announced in 2014 that the Arctic was a strategic priority for its military.

Kochnev in 2015 wrote an emotional blog post after a bear near a military construction site on Wrangel island swallowed an explosive flare. He criticized the new base, and was fired from his job in a national park as a result.

Current instructions regarding polar bears focus on how to ward them off, he said. But the priority should be fortifying facilities to prevent any contact.

“Put yourself inside a cage and let the bears roam around,” he said in advice to Arctic developers.

Mordvintsev, however, said this would not work on Novaya Zemlya, where winds would turn any fence into a giant snowdrift for bears to walk over. 

Belushya Guba is planning to install cameras and address its waste problem, he said. Already all arrivals to the local airport listen to a mandatory lecture on polar bear behavior.

Moscow’s plans to develop the Northern Passage also pose a problem for polar bears in the region, he said.

“Constant use of icebreakers through ice where seals give birth affects populations of seals” which bears feed on.

Putin last year ordered an increase in the capacity of the Northern Passage, touted as an alternate trade route to Asia, from the current 18 million tonnes to 80 million tonnes by 2024.

Kochnev said bears have been able to adapt so far to unfavorable trends, learning to feed in groups rather than hunt in solitude. But if warming continues, “polar bears will simply leave Russia.”

“If the ice-free period increases by another two-three weeks, they will likely migrate to northern Canada, where changes have been less noticeable,” he said. 

The ones that stay behind on Russian soil, meanwhile, will eventually get killed off in conflicts with humans. 
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Did you hear what happened when Bill Gates walked into a bar? Everybody there immediately became millionaires — on average.

That joke about a very rich man is an old one among statisticians. So why did Peter Smibert use it to explain a revolution in biology?

Because it shows averages can be misleading. And Smibert, of the New York Genome Center, says that includes when scientists are trying to understand the basic unit of life, the cell. 

Until recently, trying to study key traits of cells from people and other animals often meant analyzing bulk samples of tissue, producing a mushed-up average of results from many cell types. It was like trying to learn about a banana by studying a strawberry-blueberry-orange-banana smoothie. 

In recent years, however, scientists have developed techniques that let them directly study the DNA codes, the activity of genes and other traits of individual cells. The approach has become widely adopted, revealing details about the body that couldn’t be shown before. And it has opened the door to pursuing an audacious goal: listing every cell type in the human body.

“Single-cell analysis is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of our biology and health,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, declared recently. 

In fact, the journal Science named the techniques that allow single-cell tracking of gene activity over time in developing organisms and organs as its “breakthrough of the year” for 2018. Its announcement declared, “The single-cell revolution is just starting.” 

A slew of discoveries

Even complicated animals like us are really just massive communities of cells, each taking on a particular role and working with its neighbors. An average adult human has 37 trillion or so of them, and they’re surprisingly varied: the inner lining of the colon, for example, has more than 50 kinds of cells.

It was just five years ago that methods for decoding of DNA and its chemical cousin RNA from individual cells became broadly accessible, according to the journal Nature Methods. New techniques are still being developed to pry more and more secrets out of individual cells.

The single-cell approach is leading to a slew of discoveries. In just the past year, for example:

Scientists closely tracked gene activity within fish and frog embryos, a step toward the longstanding goal of understanding how a single fertilized egg can produce an animal. One study compiled results from more than 92,000 zebrafish embryonic cells.
Other researchers revealed details of the physical connection between pregnant women and the fetus, giving potential clues for understanding some causes of stillbirth.
A study found a pattern of gene activity in some melanoma cells that let them resist immunotherapy, the practice of unleashing the body's immune system on cancer. That might lead to finding a way to render those cells vulnerable. 

And a pair of other studies may affect research into cystic fibrosis, the genetic disease that causes lung infections and limits breathing ability. Scientists have long known that the disease stems from a faulty version of protein called CFTR. The studies identified a type of rare cell in the airway that makes large amounts of CFTR, surpassing earlier but only dimly understood indications that such cells existed.

The discovery offers great potential for guiding the development of new treatments, said Dr. William Skach, senior vice president of research affairs for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Single-cell techniques will be important in studying them further for coming up with new therapies, he said. (Two co-authors of one paper are from the foundation).

At the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas, Nicholas Navin uses single-cell DNA studies to reveal different patterns of mutations in various cells of a single tumor. That lets him reconstruct when and where those mutations appeared as the tumor evolved from benign cells. And he can identify cells that contain combinations of mutations that make them the most lethal. 

Someday, such research should indicate what treatments to use for particular patients, or which patients have the highest risk of the disease progressing, he says. It might also allow doctors to check how well their treatments are working against a cancer over time. A decade or two from now, it might let doctors detect cancers very early by picking up and analyzing the DNA of rare cells in blood tests, he says. 

Mapping all the cells

Meanwhile, the ability to produce single-cell results for hundreds of thousands of cells at a time has opened the door to a huge effort to catalog every cell type in the human body. More than 1,000 scientists from 57 countries have joined the Human Cell Atlas Consortium , which estimates it will eventually profile at least 10 billion cells found in both healthy and sick people. 

Why do this? It’s a natural follow to the big project that catalogued all the human genes, says co-organizer Aviv Regev, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. (Her salary is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press Health & Science Department.)

The gene map led to identifying thousands of genetic variants that raise or lower the risk of many diseases. But to turn that into therapies, scientists have to know in which cells those variants act, she said. And to run down those cells in the human body, “we have to map all of them.”

Some cells are rarer than others, but these can be just as critical for a functioning body as their more plentiful neighbors, she said.

She hopes for a first draft of the cell atlas in about five years, focused on certain organs and tissues of the body. To finish the job might take about a decade, she figures. Regev won’t hazard a guess about how many cell types will be found for the entire human body.

“This is not going to cure all disease immediately,” she said, but “it is a critical stepping stone.”
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Women’s rights activists from 128 nations are launching a public campaign Tuesday for an international treaty to end violence against women and girls, a global scourge estimated by the United Nations to affect 35 percent of females worldwide.

The campaign led by the Seattle-based nonprofit organization Every Woman Treaty aims to have the U.N. World Health Organization adopt the treaty with the goal of getting all 193 U.N. member states to ratify it.

“Violence against women and girls is the most widespread human rights violation on Earth,” the organization’s co-founder and chief executive, Lisa Shannon, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday ahead of the official launch.

“All the efforts that people put into development, education, women’s empowerment, economic opportunity are being squashed when women are not physically safe,” she said. “It’s a global pandemic. … We cannot make progress as a species without addressing violence against women and girls.”

The activists want the treaty to require countries to take four actions that have proven to lower rates of violence against women:

Adopt laws punishing domestic violence, which lower mortality rates for women.
Train police, judges, nurses, doctors and other professionals about such violence, which leads to increased prosecution of perpetrators and better treatment for survivors.
Provide education on preventing violence against women and girls, which research shows has an influence on boys' and men's attitudes and actions, and encourages women and girls to demand their rights.
Provide hotlines, shelters, legal advice, treatment and other services for survivors.

Eleanor Eleanor Nwadinobi of Nigeria, a member of Every Woman Treaty’s steering committee, said the other critical issue is funding, which “is absolutely essential” to enable governments, especially in developing countries, to carry out this essential work to combat violence against women and girls.

Shannon said the activists are modeling their campaign after the efforts that led to the successful treaty on eliminating land mines, which took force in 1999, and the treaty aimed at limiting the use of tobacco, which was the first pact negotiated under WHO auspices and entered into force in 2005.

In the first 36 hours of the mine ban treaty, nations pledged $500 million toward its implementation, Shannon said.

She expressed hope that a treaty tackling violence against women and girls would lead to a $4 billion-a-year fund for financing global action, “which would be about a dollar per female on Earth.”

Every Woman Treaty was started in 2013 and Shannon said it has been working behind the scenes to build support and come up with recommendations and a rough draft of a treaty.

More than 4,000 individuals and organizations have signed what she called “a one-page people’s treaty” that condemns all forms of violence against women and girls, outlines the actions sought in a treaty, and urges nations to adopt it. Among the signatories are Nobel Peace Prize winners Shirin Ebadi of Iran, Tawakol Karman of Yemen and Jody Williams of the United States.

Shannon said the activists are seeking 20 countries to lead the campaign for the new treaty.

First, she said, they need the World Health Organization to approve a resolution seeking a report on the role a treaty would play. “Our goal is to have the resolution introduced at the 2020 World Health Assembly,” which she called very ambitious.

Once a report is written, Shannon said, the World Health Assembly would have to approve the process for drafting a treaty.

“The largest obstacle I see is to fight the apathy,” she said. “When you’re asking for global systems change and genuine commitments, even people who are pro-women’s rights will question whether or not it’s needed, will say it’s unnecessary — and this is something the tobacco and land mines and disabilities treaties faced.”

Shannon said the biggest immediate challenge is finding countries willing to take on a leadership role and getting people to understand this is “an opportunity that we have to take right now” because “we are not going to advance” unless violence against women and girls is addressed.
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Open water has replaced sea ice in much of the Bering Sea off Alaska’s west coast, leaving villages vulnerable to powerful winter storms and adding challenges to Alaska Native hunters seeking marine mammals, an expert said Monday.

Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment & Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said that winter storms over five weeks obliterated thin ice that had formed since December.

Wind blew ice to Russian beaches in the west and to the south side of Norton Sound south of Nome but left open water all the way to Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait.

“You can take your sailboat from Dillingham to Diomede today,” he said.

Sea ice historically covers much of the Bering Sea throughout the winter with maximum coverage through March. Kotzebue Sound, a great bay northeast of the Bering Strait, already has open water, an occurrence normally seen in June.

It’s the second consecutive winter for low sea ice. Last year, it was low all season. This winter, a warm November was followed by a cold December and January, Thoman said.

“Then the weather pattern changed and the ice has just collapsed,” he said. He suspects that heat in the ocean played a factor.

Phyllis Stabenow, a physical oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday that storms played a large role in the extreme low ice.

Winds from November to April typically blow out of the north or northwest and are cold, driving ice southward, she said by email. The year, warm winds in a series of storms blew out of the southwest in mid-January and especially February.

“These storms broke the ice up and pushed it north. Also some of the ice melted. So the ice is now similar in extent to what it was last year at this time and last year had the lowest maximum ice extent ever observed,” she said.

Thoman and Stabenow did not label the unusual ice event as climate change. The Bering Sea has been warm for several years, Thoman said. The ice loss can be attributed to a warm ocean and combination of an unusual but not unprecedented weather pattern.

However, some events are unlikely to occur without climate change, he said.

Stabenow said no single event can be attributed to climate change.

“What can be said is that some climate models predict more southerly winds, which will reduce ice extent,” she said. “Also, an increase in southerly winds in the northern Bering Sea during the fall and winter has been observed since 2016.”

Sea ice is an important feature of the ecosystem. Its absence has implications above and below the ocean surface.

Coastal communities historically could rely on a barrier of sea ice after Labor Day to protect them from the pounding of fierce winter storms. Without an ice cover, waves erode beaches and sometimes flood villages, Thoman said.

Residents of coastal villages traditionally hunt and butcher marine mammals such as walruses and seals when the animals “haul out” on ice. Residents of St. Lawrence Island last year had to try to hunt in open water far from shore, Thoman said.

“Now instead of going out one mile, you have to go out 50. There’s that increased cost,” Thoman said. “It’s much more difficult to butcher an animal the size of a walrus in a boat as opposed to on ice. Much greater chance of injury to the people. Much greater chance of losing the animal altogether.”

Sea ice historically has formed a “cold pool” in the central Bering Sea, a barrier of cold water that sets the structure for fish. The cold pool acts as a thermal wall, keeping valuable commercial fish such walleye pollock and Pacific cod, in the southern and central Bering Sea.

In the absence of sea ice last year, federal fish biologists conducting surveys found that a 2018 cold pool had not formed and that southern species had migrated north in far greater numbers.
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