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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Human rights advocates are calling for an end to the discrimination that denies children with disabilities the same right to an equal education and other opportunities available to other children in society. The U.N. Human Rights Council is holding a special session in Geneva on the empowerment of children with disabilities.

In keeping with the theme of the day, the U.N. has made the Council chamber wheelchair-accessible, has hired a sign interpreter for the hearing impaired, and has embossed some oral statements in Braille.

With these accommodations to children with disabilities, the U.N. is sending a message that it practices what it preaches. It is saying children with disabilities will be able to lead a full and fulfilling life on a par with other children if certain adaptations are made to their needs.

However, the United Nations reports the sad reality is that 93 million children with disabilities around the world are likely to have their rights violated from the moment they are born. It says millions of these children are torn from their families and placed in institutions where they are at risk of violence, abuse and neglect.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, is a medical doctor and a pediatrician. In her practice, she says she quickly learned the voices of disabled children too often go unheard.

“While preparing for today, I was remembering when I just started to be a pediatrician how people will leave the situation of children with disabilities. It was much more complicated. People denied, people hide those children. They will put them sort of in boxes so they will not really be able to develop. They will speak — even doctors in front of the children — like either they did not hear or that they did not exist.”

Experts debating the issue agree children with disabilities must be provided with an education on an equal basis with all children. They consider this a crucial step toward their empowerment and the realization of other key rights.

They say the empowerment of children with disabilities also depends upon the implementation of laws, policies and measures to tackle harmful social norms and protect them from discrimination, stigma and abuse.

High Commissioner Bachelet says children with disabilities are among the most likely to be left behind and the least likely to be heard. She says they have the right to raise their voices and to be heard in decisions affecting their lives.

 
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Yetnebersh Nigussie lost her sight at the age of five, but she has not let her disability slow her down. A tireless advocate for people with disabilities in Africa, she has received prestigious prizes, including the Spirit of Helen Keller Award and the Alternative Nobel Prize. Yetnebersh Nigussie recently spoke to VOA’s Salem Solomon from our studios in New York. Here’s her story.
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Simple DNA testing kits are becoming more popular and affordable. Today, genetic tests can show where your family came from, give you insight into your health, and even reveal unknown living relatives. Nastassia Jaumen has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
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Scientists estimate half of the world’s corals have been devastated as climate change has led to warmer oceans. When water temperatures get too high, corals become stressed and expel the algae that coats their tissues and provides the corals’ primary food source. The corals gradually lose their color, known as bleaching, and many of them die. But surprisingly, there are corals in one sea in the Middle East that are resistance to the rising temperatures. VOAs Deborah Block explains why.
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The charity Doctors Without Borders has suspended its Ebola virus-fighting operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo after attacks on two of its treatment centers this week, raising the risk that Ebola infections in the area will increase.

The World Health Organization has called the Feb. 24 attack in Katwa and the Feb. 27 attack in Butembo “deplorable.” In Butembo, where the center housed 12 confirmed Ebola patients and 38 with suspected Ebola, four patients with the highly contagious virus fled for their lives. One is still missing.

The attackers set fire to the treatment centers and engaged in gunfire with security forces.

MSF halts treatment

Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medicins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, announced Friday it had halted treatment in Butembo, in the eastern RDC province of North Kivu. It had done the same earlier in the week in Katwa, the latest hot spot in the outbreak first reported last August.

WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters that experts must now track possible paths of infection.

“It is highly important to find those people, that last patient, and then, of course, immediately start the contact tracing and monitor the contacts these patients might have been in touch with,” Lindmeier said.

DRC health minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga told VOA French to Africa that the problem with the Ebola situation lies in Katwa and Butembo, where “communities are not fully engaged.” He also said armed groups and unidentified gunmen are common in the area.

A spokeswoman for DRC’s health ministry, Jessica Ilunga, said the government will examine options over the next few days to protect health agents and stop any spread of the disease resulting from the attacks.

Michel Yao, incident manager for the WHO, said of the attackers: “It looks like an organized group that wants to target treatment centers.” He said the loss is great because the centers that were damaged had been testing experimental treatments with some success.

Whitney Elmer of the group Mercy Corps told The New York Times that the loss of two treatment centers at the midst of the outbreak is “crippling.”

Hundreds with disease

The Health Ministry reported that at least 885 have contracted the disease, and 550 have died of it, since the outbreak began.

The Ebola outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, declared in August, is the second largest in history, after the 2014 epidemic in West Africa that killed more than 11,000 people. The WHO says the risk remains “very high” for the outbreak to spread across the borders into Rwanda, Uganda or South Sudan — or to spread nationally across the DRC.
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NASA’s newest Mars lander has started digging into the red planet, but hit a few snags, scientists said Friday.

The German drilling instrument on the InSight lander hit what appeared to be a couple of stones. It only managed to burrow between half a foot (18 centimeters) and about 1-and-a-half feet (50 centimeters), far short of the first dig’s goal, said the German Aerospace Center.

The hammering device in the “mole” was developed by the Astronika engineering company in Poland.

“This is not very good news for me because although the hammer is proving itself … the Mars environment is not very favorable to us,” said the company’s chief engineer, Jerzy Grygorczuk.

Over time, the team is shooting for a depth of up to 16 feet (5 meters), which would set an otherworldly record. The lander is digging deep to measure the planet’s internal temperature.

InSight landed on Mars last November. Flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent commands to the lander Thursday to begin digging. It’ll rest for a bit before burrowing again.

The spacecraft already has a seismometer on the surface, listening for potential quakes. The lander is stationary, but has a robot arm to maneuver these two main experiments.
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