YCLOAK

A Chinese researcher’s surprise claim that he is the first person in the world to successfully edit the genes of a pair of recently born twin girls, making them resistant to HIV, the AIDS virus, has been met with criticism, scorn and denial in China.

 

Provincial health authorities in the southern province of Guangdong released a statement Tuesday announcing that an investigation into the experiment, which involved seven couples and one successful pregnancy, already is under way and being given utmost attention.

 

“Results of the investigation will be promptly released to the public,” the statement said.

 

Continuous denials

 

China’s Ministry of Health said it was placing a high priority on the case and that it ordered the probe. Meanwhile, those who supposedly were involved in approving an ethical review of the experiment that He Jiankui said he conducted are distancing themselves.

 

He is an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, but his employer has said that the researcher has been on leave without pay since February and that the school was not aware of the experiment.

 

The Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission said it had not received an ethical assessment application for the study.

 

According to a form posted online, the city’s science and innovation committee was listed as backing the experiment, something the panel denies.

 

The Shenzhen Harmonicare Hospital was listed as having given ethical approval for He’s experiment, although the hospital is denying this.

 

According to Reuters, Hong Kong-listed Harmonicare Medical Holdings has issued a statement saying the signatures on the form posted online are suspected of having been forged and that “no relevant meeting of the Medical Ethics Committee of the hospital, in fact, took place.”

 

In its exclusive report on the experiment released Monday, the Associated Press noted that He Jiankui gave official notice of his trial to authorities on November 8, long after his research had begun and during the same month that the two baby girls — Lulu and Nana — were born.

 

It was clear from He’s interview with AP, that He knew what he was getting himself into. He told AP he was aware of the possible ramifications for future research.

 

“I feel a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also make it an example,” He said.

 

He currently is in Hong Kong and is expected to deliver a speech at the University of Hong Kong on Wednesday at a summit on human genome editing.

Heated debate

 

Revelations of the experiment were quickly met with criticism, both and home and abroad, although in China, the pushback was particularly sharp.

 

Shortly after news broke on Monday, 122 scientists issued an open letter warning that the gene editing tool used in the experiment, the CRISPR-Cas 9 technology, was risky. The scientists also voiced concern the experiment could harm the reputation and development of China’s biomedical community.

 

The Chinese news website the Paper posted a copy of the statement online in which the scientists said, “Pandora’s box has been opened. We still might have a glimmer of hope to close it before it’s too late.”

 

They also said the biomedical ethics review for the so-called research existed only in name.

 

“Conducting direct human experiments can only be described as crazy,” they said.

 

On social media in China, however, some were optimistic and exuberant about the prospects the claimed breakthrough could bring to fighting disease.

 

“What is wrong with replacing old humanity with a new humanity? Who doesn’t want to be smarter, live longer, be stronger and healthier?” one post said. “I never expected to see something like Marvel comics in real life…a rebel eccentric scientist as the protagonist who wants to save all human beings.”

 

Others were worried about the bigger ramifications.

 

“In the future, humans will create humans and the fatality rate will largely decrease; meanwhile there will be less resources and more competition. We cannot go against natural law,” argued one posting. Another quipped: “For the first time I wish it was an academic fraud.”

 

Genetic Frankenstein

 

Liu Wei, a Chinese scientist, said that right now there still are too many uncertainties, adding that the technology has the capability of becoming a genetic version of Frankenstein.

 

“People are not quite clear about the long-term function of every gene yet. Based on the knowledge we have now, modifying the gene could avoid one disease but may bring about other problems,” Liu noted.

He added that since the technology is cutting-edge there is a big risk those involved in the review process lack the understanding needed, which could lead to negligence.

 

“If the technology is mature enough, there will definitely be a huge demand in the market to modify the genes of babies, which could lead to black market exchanges and many other challenges,” he said. “We may need more measures to deal with it and simply advocating ethics will not solve the problem.”
…

The United Nations says all countries must triple efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit an average global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius by 2030.

The ninth annual U.N. Environmental Program Emissions Gap report released Tuesday says emissions in 2030 could be up to 15 billion tons higher than needed to prevent a more than two degree hike.

The report said emissions in 2030 would need to be 55 percent lower than they were in 2017 to limit the average increase to a safer 1.5 degrees.

The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for limiting a temperature rise to between 1.5 and two degrees.

The report said emissions reached a record high of 53.5 tons in 2017 after three years of decreases.

The report also said the world’s 20 largest economies, the Group of Twenty, are not on track to meet their goals in 2030.

The analysis follows a special report last month by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It concluded that two degrees of warming, once believed to be a safe threshold, would trigger more deadly extreme weather events.  The report said limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees would require countries to make rapid and unprecedented changes.

“If the IPCC report represented a global fire alarm, this report is the arson investigation,” said UNEP deputy executive director Joyce Msuya.  “The science is clear; for all the ambitious climate action we have seen, government’s need to move faster and with greater urgency. We are feeding this fire while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”

Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration issued The National Climate Assessment, which predicts climate change could cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually through the end of the century.

Trump, who has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement, has dismissed that prediction, telling a reporter Friday, “I don’t believe it.  No, no, I don’t believe it.”

A U.N. climate conference will be held in Poland December 2-14, when officials will produce a “rule book” on how to implement the Paris agreement.

 
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A humanitarian group working in northern Nigeria says it has recorded 10,000 cases of cholera there and that at least 175 people have died from the disease since the start of November. The Norwegian Refugee Council says most of the cases were found in camps for displaced people in Borno state, where thousands seek refuge from Boko Haram attacks. Timothy Obiezu reports from Maiduguri.
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NASA scientists were ecstatic Monday when they received word from 54 million kilometers away that their newest mission to Mars had arrived safely. The probe is called InSight and true to its name. Officials say it’s going to give scientists new insight into what’s inside the Red Planet. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Scientists warn that Brazil’s president-elect could push the Amazon rainforest past its tipping point — with severe consequences for global climate and rainfall.

 

Jair Bolsonaro, who takes office Jan. 1, claims a mandate to convert land for cattle pastures and soybean farms, calling Brazil’s rainforest protections an economic obstacle.

 

Brazilians on Oct. 28 elected Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate who channeled outrage at the corruption scandals of the former government and support from agribusiness groups.

 

Next week global leaders will meet in Poland for an international climate conference to discuss how to curb climate change, and questions about Brazil’s role in shaping the future of the Amazon rainforest after Bolsonaro’s election loom large. New Brazilian government data show the rate of deforestation — a major factor in global warming — has already increased over the past year.

 

Brazil contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, and scientists are worried.

 

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the planet’s living systems, said Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo.

 

Each tree stores carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. The Amazon takes in as much as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year and releases 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen, earning it the nickname “the lungs of the planet.”

 

It’s also a global weather-maker.

 

Stretching 10 times the size of Texas, the Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. Billions of trees suck up water through deep roots and bring it up to their leaves, which release water vapor that forms a thick mist over the rainforest canopy.

 

This mist ascends into clouds and eventually becomes rainfall — a cycle that shapes seasons in South America and far beyond.

 

By one estimate, the Amazon creates 30 to 50 percent of its own rainfall.

 

Now the integrity of all of three functions — as a carbon sink, the Earth’s lungs, and a rainmaker — hangs in the balance.

On the campaign trail, Bolsonaro promised to loosen protections for areas of the Brazilian Amazon designated as indigenous lands and nature reserves, calling them impediments to economic growth. “All these reserves cause problems to development,” he told supporters.

 

He has also repeatedly talked about gutting the power of the environmental ministry to enforce existing green laws.

 

“If Bolsonaro keeps his campaign promises, deforestation of the Amazon will probably increase quickly — and the effects will be felt everywhere on the planet,” said Paulo Artaxo, a professor of environmental physics at the University of Sao Paulo.

 

Bolsonaro’s transition team did not respond to an interview request from the Associated Press.

 

Brazil was once seen as a global environmental success story. Between 2004 and 2014, stricter enforcement of laws to safeguard the rainforest — aided by regular satellite monitoring and protections for lands designated reserves for indigenous peoples — sharply curbed the rate of deforestation, which peaked in the early 2000s at about 9,650 square miles a year (25,000 square kilometers).

 

After a political crisis engulfed Brazil, leading to the 2016 impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, enforcement faltered. Ranchers and farmers began to convert more rainforest to pastureland and cropland. Between 2014 and 2017, annual deforestation doubled to about 3,090 square miles (8,000 square kilometers). Most often, the trees and underbrush cut down are simply burned, directly releasing carbon dioxide, said Artaxo.

 

“In the Brazilian Amazon, far and away the largest source of deforestation is industrial agriculture and cattle ranching,” said Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Now observers are parsing Bolsonaro’s campaign statements and positions as a congressman to anticipate what’s next for the Amazon.

 

Bolsonaro — who some call “tropical Trump” because of some similarities to U.S. President Donald Trump — is a former army captain with a knack for channeling outrage and generating headlines. As a federal congressman for 27 years, he led legislative campaigns to unravel land protections for indigenous people and to promote agribusiness. He also made derogatory comments about minorities, women, and LGBT people.

 

Much of his support comes from business and farming interests.

 

“These farmers are not invaders, they are producers,” said congressman and senator-elect Luiz Carlos Heinze, a farmer and close ally of Bolsonaro. He blamed past “leftist administrations” for promoting indigenous rights at the expense of farmers and ranchers.

 

“Brazil will be the biggest farming nation on Earth during Bolsonaro’s years,” said Heinze.

 

Indigenous-rights advocates are worried about the new direction signaled. “Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that indigenous territories in the Amazon should be opened up for mining and agribusiness, which goes completely in the opposite direction of our Constitution,” said Adriana Ramos, public policy coordinator at Social Environmental Institute in Brasilia, a non-governmental group.

 

In a Nov. 1 postelection interview with Catholic TV, Bolsonaro said, “We intend to protect the environment, but without creating difficulties for our progress.”

 

Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that Brazil should withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, a treaty his predecessor signed in 2016 committing to reduce carbon emissions 37 percent over 2005 levels by 2030. After the election, he has publicly wavered.

 

Meanwhile he has named a climate-change denier, Ernesto Araujo, to become the next foreign minister.

 

Nelson Ananias Filho, sustainability coordinator at Brazil’s National Agriculture and Cattle Raising Confederation, which backed Bolsonaro’s campaign, said, “Brazil’s agribusiness will adapt to whatever circumstances come.”

 

Whether or not Brazil formally remains in the Paris Climate Accord, the only way for the country to make its emission targets is to completely stop deforestation by 2030 and to reduce agricultural emissions, said Nobre, the climate scientist. “If Bolsonaro keeps moving in the current direction, that’s basically impossible.”

 

There’s another danger lurking in deforestation.

 

Aside from the oceans, tropical forests are the most important regions on the planet for putting water vapor in the air, which eventually becomes rainfall. “It’s why we have rain in the American Midwest and other inland areas — it’s not just the Amazon, but it’s the largest tropical rainforest,” said Bill Laurance, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

 

Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy, an environmental scientist at George Mason University, have estimated that the “tipping point for the Amazon system” is 20 to 25 percent deforestation.

 

Without enough trees to sustain the rainfall, the longer and more pronounced dry season could turn more than half the rainforest into a tropical savannah, they wrote in February in the journal Science Advances.

 

If the rainfall cycle collapses, winter droughts in parts of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina could devastate agriculture, they wrote. The impacts may even be felt as far away as the American Midwest, said Laurance.

 

Bolsonaro’s rhetoric about potentially dismantling the environmental ministry and rolling back indigenous rights worries Nobre who says, “I am a scientist, but I am also a Brazilian citizen, and a citizen of the planet.”
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This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

Greyhound Bay was once a place where old ships came to die. A wild stretch of coast on the western edge of the Sahara, its shallows made a convenient, if desolate, spot to scuttle an obsolete trawler, freighter or tug. So many vessels went to their graves here, the nearby port of Nouadhibou seemed captive to a ghostly armada keeping vigil over the dunes.

Today, navigators plotting a course for this gateway to the West African nation of Mauritania have no intention of abandoning ship. Turkish fishing boats bob at anchor, laundry strung out to dry above deck. In the open sea, the convex hulls of Chinese vessels carve V-shaped wakes through the swells.

Nearer shore, nomads-turned-octopus-catchers scan the surface through the eye-slits of headgear that once shielded them from sandstorms.

But the most lucrative activity of all takes place behind high walls. It would be easy to miss entirely — were it not for the stomach-turning stench.

On a recent Saturday, factory manager Hamoud El-Mami watched through a warehouse gate at Africa Protéine SA as two of his workers trudged knee-deep through a silvery, undulating heap of sardinella, a sardine-like fish that thrives by the billion in the Canary Current off northwest Africa.

Seemingly oblivious to the smell, the rubber-booted laborers shoveled the fish into a proboscis-like chute. Armed with a giant rotating screw, the device liquidized each sardinella on contact, then sucked the resulting gray goo through a hole in the wall and into the bulky contraptions of the factory proper.

The hungry machines of Africa Protéine are producing fishmeal — a nutrient-laden powder that fuels the $160 billion aquaculture industry. One of the world’s fastest-growing food sectors, aquaculture is rapidly overtaking wild-capture fisheries as the biggest source of fish for human consumption.

From the shrimp ponds of China’s river deltas to the salmon cages of Norway’s fjords, the industry thrives by feeding fish to other fish. Its needs are so voracious, roughly 20 percent of the world’s wild-caught fish don’t even go near anyone’s plate but are instead ground up to make fishmeal.

With relentless demand from China pushing fishmeal prices to record highs, companies have set their sights on West Africa as a new source of supply. From state-owned conglomerates to adventurous entrepreneurs, Chinese investors are racing to build new factories on the shores of Mauritania and its two neighbors to the south, Senegal and Gambia.

But in the rush for sardinella, global business interests are snatching a staple of West Africa’s diet from the people who need it the most. And the blades of the grinding machines are posing a new threat to the species at a time when climate change already has sardinella swimming for its life.

“In four or five years, there won’t be any fish stocks left; the factories will close, and the foreigners will leave,” said Abdou Karim Sall, president of an association of small-scale fishermen in Senegal known by its French acronym, Papas. “We’ll be left here without any fish.”

Satellite data indicate that the waters off northern Senegal and Mauritania are warming faster than any other part of the equator-girdling belt called the tropical convergence zone, once known to sailors simply as the “doldrums.” This hidden-from-view climate change has had an ominous impact: A new study by researchers at the Marseille-based institute IRD-France found that the rising temperatures have pushed sardinella an average of 200 miles north since 1995.

The findings, the results of which were shared with Reuters, provide the first clear evidence that West Africa’s sardinella are joining a worldwide diaspora of sea creatures fleeing poleward or deeper as waters warm. The sheer scale of this mass migration dwarfs anything taking place on land: Fish are moving 10 times farther on average than terrestrial animals affected by rising temperatures, according to Professor Camille Parmesan, an authority on climate impacts on marine life at the University of Plymouth.

Climate change is not only displacing sardinella from their traditional habitat, it’s putting pressure on the fish in another, indirect way, by increasing the incentives for West African fishmeal production even further.

Peru is by far the world’s biggest exporter of fishmeal, manufactured from its vast shoals of anchovies. As such, the country exerts an influence on fishmeal prices comparable to Saudi Arabia’s role as a swing producer of crude oil. Since the early 1970s, the El Niño weather phenomenon has periodically caused catastrophic losses to Peru’s gigantic anchovy catch by disrupting the upwelling mechanism that provides that fish with nutrients. In the past decade, climate change appears to have increased the frequency of El  Niño’s effects, which can in turn cause fishmeal prices to track significantly higher.

This growing volatility might bode well for West Africa’s fishmeal producers, who stand to make more money each time prices spike. But overproduction could have dire consequences for millions of the region’s people, by endangering the fish they depend on for their primary source of employment, income and protein.

Demand for fishmeal has already caused Mauritania’s annual catch of sardinella to surge from 440,000 tons to 770,000 tons within the space of a few years, according to a European Union-funded report published in 2015. Senegalese boats working under contract to the plants increased their landings tenfold between 2008 and 2012 alone, the report found. The Canary Current’s fish stocks, marine scientists say, won’t be able to withstand this kind of pressure for much longer.

Coastal communities in West Africa are already among the populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Rising seas have begun to swallow coastal villages whole, while rougher weather is making fishing ever more perilous. Droughts and irregular rainfall have forced farmers to abandon their land and head for the shore, swelling the fast-growing ranks of men whose best hope of feeding their families lies beyond the breakers.

But on the spit of land in Nouadhibou where laborers await the arrival of the next truckload of fish, factory bosses shrug their shoulders at talk of the swirling shoals of sardinella ever running out.

“Fish are still abundant,” El-Mami said, gesturing toward a nearby beach with a grin. “If you take your fishing rod over there now, you’ll catch a beautiful fish.”

Changing fortunes 

Painted eyes stare from the prows of the pirogues wallowing in the surf at Joal-Fadiouth, the frenetic hub of Senegal’s fishing industry. Emblazoned with the names of revered spiritual leaders whose influence permeates all tiers of Senegalese society, some also reflect more worldly aspirations: the neatly rendered crest of Manchester City football club or the words “Barack Obama.”

A gold-rush mentality has doubled the size of the country’s small-scale fishing fleet in the past decade. Eager to win votes, the government has subsidized outboard motors to allow fishermen to rove even farther. Now directly or indirectly employing 600,000 people, or 17 percent of the workforce, the fast-growing fleet is threatening to throttle the very resource that sustains it.

On a recent Tuesday, captain Doudou Kotè clambered out of his boat and onto a cart pulled by a horse evidently at home in the waves. Borne regally through the surf in this amphibious taxi, Kotè echoed what many of his fellow fishermen are saying: Sardinella, a talismanic species in Senegal, is in the midst of a vanishing act.

“Nowadays, there are more pirogues: People who didn’t own any pirogues now own one, and people who used to own one now have two,” said Kotè, a stout mariner who wore green waders and a conical lambskin hat. “Often we come home without catching anything — not enough to buy fuel, or even to eat.”

A naturally jovial man with two wives and six children, Kotè’s expression darkened as he predicted that pressure on sardinella would soon cause stocks of the fish to collapse. “If I had any other job to do, I’d stop fishing,” he said.

It’s not just Senegalese who are losing out because their staple is being turned into fishmeal. In Mauritania, the industry has been grinding at least 330,000 tons of fish a year that were previously sold in West African markets such as Ghana, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, researchers estimate. That’s nearly equivalent to the entire annual fish consumption of Senegal’s population of 15 million.

Although Senegal produces only a fraction of the volume of fishmeal exported by the roughly 30 Mauritanian factories, its dozen plants could pose a disproportionate risk by disrupting a delicate market mechanism that once limited how much fishermen would take.

In the past, in seasons when sardinella migrated closer to shore, Kotè and his comrades could easily land more than the local market could absorb. Crews would dump the fish they couldn’t sell to rot on the sand, then stay home until the glut passed. With the factories now willing to buy every last fish, there’s nothing to stop the fishing fleet from pushing stocks to the point of collapse.

“We could face a catastrophic situation,” said Patrice Brehmer, a marine scientist at IRD-France, who co-authored the study revealing that warming waters are pushing sardinella northward.

The growing imbalance between people and nature in the Canary Current has fishermen wondering if they will soon be forced to return to the poverty of their ancestral villages.

Ibrahima Samba once scratched a living by growing peanuts and millet on his family plot outside the Senegalese town of Mbour. When the rains began to arrive either too early or too late, he joined other farmers swapping their hoes for nets.

“We could see the climate changing: Things never worked out like we hoped, and there were always surprises,” Samba said.

“With the sea, you go out today, you fish today, and you sell straight away — and you don’t need to be a real professional to do it. We saw the fisherman had beautiful cars and were building houses, so we joined them.”

After 22 years as a fisherman, Samba says climate change is once again threatening his livelihood, this time by chasing away sardinella. “Climate change doesn’t just affect the agricultural sector, but fishing as well,” he said. “People who sold their land may well have problems, because there’s a good chance we’ll have to go back to farming.”

The impact of the fishmeal factories is already apparent in the faces of local women. Not far from the beach at Joal-Fadiouth, lazy pillars of smoke spiraled from a complex of outdoor ovens where tightly packed rows of sardinella dried slowly over glowing cinders. Many were destined to be marinated and served on a bed of spicy rice in Senegal’s national dish, known as thiéboudiène.

When times were good, the thousands of workers at this outdoor fish-drying facility — almost all of them women — could make more money than the fishermen many had married, saving enough to buy them new engines, or even boats.

Among them was Rokeya Diop, a matriarchal figure of good standing among the community that dries, smokes and salts fish for sale in local markets. These days, the acrid pall hanging over the near-deserted complex matched her mood.

As Diop watched, fire-keepers still dutifully fed straw kindling into the empty ovens and used long poles to give the smoldering ashes an occasional stir. But the fishmeal factories are willing to pay twice as much as Diop and her friends can for fresh sardinella, leaving them with nothing but time on their hands.

“Each day I stay until 10 o’clock at night but I go home empty-handed,” Diop said, slapping her palms together.

Although demand from factories is just one of many factors affecting the availability of fish from season to season in Senegal, whispering is growing louder along the coast of more monumental changes taking place at sea.

“We can’t just blame everything on the factories,” Maimouna Diokh, the treasurer for a local council that manages fishing activity in Joal-Fadiouth, said as men loaded crates of iced fish into trucks parked in a beachside loading bay. “Climate change is warming the waters, so there are fewer fish.”

Warming seas

Years of sun and saltwater have conspired to give the Amrigue, a catamaran moored in Nouadhibou harbor, a distinctly weather-beaten aspect. But the twin-engined vessel is still seaworthy enough to ferry teams of scientists out into Greyhound Bay to gather data on the warming seas.

One Saturday, the Amrigue weighed anchor near a sandbar called Gazelle Bank, about two nautical miles from the harbor.

Abdoul Dia, a laboratory chief at the Mauritanian Institute of Oceanographic Research and Fisheries, or Imrop, heaved a device used to gather sediment from the seabed off the vessel with a splash.

Hoisting a sample onto the deck, he dumped the gravel into a plastic tub and began rummaging through it with a sieve and hose. He was looking for micro-organisms that could help his colleagues build a more detailed picture of how conditions are changing.

The big picture is already clear: Thirty years of measurements show that the balmy waters off Mauritania are getting hotter. “If you look, you’ll see an increase in average temperature that confirms the warming trend,” Dia said, an orange life jacket slung over his white lab coat.

At Imrop’s headquarters, on a bluff overlooking the bay, Dia explained why this warming was so significant. Nouadhibou sits near a convergence zone where cooler waters to the north collide with tropical waters to the south. The precise latitude of this thermal front oscillates a little every year. But as waters have warmed, it has begun fluctuating much farther north, even roving as far as the Moroccan city of Casablanca, 870 miles away. The center of gravity of the sardinella stock has moved northward in tandem as the species has sought to maintain an optimal temperature.

The shift is good news for Mauritania’s fishmeal factories, because the sardinella are now concentrated closer by. But it’s bad news for fishermen to the south in Senegal and Gambia, whose lifeline fish stocks are migrating farther away.

Some researchers believe that, over time, the warming trend might actually increase the abundance of fish in the Canary Current as new species find a foothold in the changing conditions. But others see a more dystopian future.

Vicky Lam, a fisheries economist at the Institute for Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and three researchers published a study in 2012 of the possible impact of climate change on fisheries in 14 West African nations, including Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia. Their projections for 2050 were bleak: a 21 percent drop in the annual landed value of catches, a 50 percent decline in fisheries-related jobs and an annual loss of $311 million to the regional economy.

The fishmeal industry is only adding to the pressure. Ad Corten, who chairs the sardinella committee in a stock assessment group that advises the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said fishing vessels were taking too much from the Canary Current even before the factories came.

“This is going to burst within one or two years,” Corten told Reuters. “We’re already noticing a scarcity of sardinella in Mauritanian waters. We hear the same stories from Senegal.”

Fishermen sense that the sea’s character is changing. Last year, the coldest snap off Nouadhibou in 20 years hurt catches of sardinella and octopus. Swallows migrating through the nearby dunes turned up six weeks late. The fierce wind that normally roils the ocean from March to June refused to blow. In Morocco, snow fell in the desert city of Zagora — the first in half a century.

“Last year the ocean was completely crazy,” Abdel Aziz Boughourbal, manager of Omaurci SA, one of the biggest Mauritanian fish-processing and fishmeal companies, said over a dish of fried octopus at a waterfront restaurant where visiting sailors crack open cans of imported beer. He said a Chilean crewman on one of his vessels was astonished recently when his boat ran into a huge shoal of anchovies — the kind normally found off Peru.

Rush of Chinese investors

Some Chinese investors don’t seem to share the fishermen’s fears. Over the past few years, major fishing companies have signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to establish fish-processing and fishmeal plants around Nouadhibou, their giant new complexes towering above the sand. Even the port’s smaller Chinese players want to expand.

“If we have the opportunity, we’ll do other projects — from more fishmeal to processing and freezing,” said Fan Yongzhen, a harried manager at Continental Seafood, one of the fishmeal factories in Nouadhibou.

In the capital, Nouakchott, the China Road and Bridge Corp., which has built giant infrastructure projects across Africa, has submitted proposals to develop a 40-square-mile marine industrial park south of the city. According to the company’s feasibility study, seen by Reuters, the plant will feature facilities to process, freeze and export fish — and, of course, fishmeal.

With everyone from Chinese industrialists to Senegalese subsistence farmers looking to the Canary Current to make their fortune, tensions have started to flare.

In January, fishermen rioted in the Senegalese port of Saint-Louis after one of their colleagues was shot dead by Mauritanian coast guards. A senior coast guard official told Reuters the man was accidentally killed when an officer opened fire to try to disable the engine of a Senegalese pirogue intent on ramming the Mauritanian patrol craft.

Sardinella migrate across a 1,000-mile zone shared by Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia. Officials from each country insist that they want to manage their fish sustainably and develop the kind of processing, freezing and export industries that could create thousands of jobs. But with no effective regional management system yet in place, this goal may not be compatible with installing ever-more grinding machines for the benefit of fish farms producing food for Asia, Europe and North America.

Bamba Banja, permanent secretary to Gambia’s fishing ministry, said his government’s priority was to make sure local people had enough fish to eat. “If it comes to the crunch, we would rather close the fishmeal factories and allow ordinary Gambians — women and the vulnerable — to have access to these resources,” he said.

Despite the government’s assurances, the Gambian town of Gunjur has emerged as a symbol of the conflict that fishmeal can unleash.

In 2016, a Chinese industrialist opened a beachside plant called Golden Lead. Although many in Gunjur are grateful to work as porters for the factory, one of three to spring up along the tiny country’s 50-mile coast, others fear that the company’s demand for fishmeal is putting the community’s long-term survival at risk.

In March, dozens of people assembled on the beach and dug up a pipe pouring factory effluent into the sea. Local activists accuse Golden Lead of fouling a nearby lagoon, a spawning ground and feeding area for migratory ospreys where crocodiles emerge to lounge on sandbanks in the mid-morning heat. They later showed Reuters photos of floating dead fish and an ugly red stain clouding the water.

Golden Lead has since been ordered by Gambia’s environment agency to extend its waste pipe 350 yards into the sea, according to an official document seen by Reuters. A few weeks after the youths dug it up, workmen arrived to make the required extension. Factory managers marked the occasion by hoisting a Chinese flag on the beach.

Golden Lead says it respects Gambian regulations and has benefited the town in multiple ways, including by providing work for dozens of laborers, making improvements to a school and donating sheep to elders at Ramadan.

“We are a business,” said a member of staff, who declined to be named. “If we didn’t do it, somebody else will come.”

Lamin Jassey, an English teacher, played a leading role in the protests against Golden Lead. He is among a small group of activists who have since been charged with criminal damage, trespass and “intimidating and annoying” the company. He had to post an $8,400 bail — almost 20 times the annual average income in Gambia.

“Today Gunjur is booming — we have a lot of fishermen. We have thousands of others coming from Senegal,” he said, watching as porters waded waist-deep into the water to unload fish to carry to the factory door. “But if the fish stock is under pressure, and at the end it’s very scarce, what do you think about the future?”

 
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Chen Hong-zhi’s notebooks are his life.

Nine years ago, Chen seriously damaged his hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with forming memories, in a traffic accident.

The 26-year-old has lost the ability to make and retain short-term memories. Instead, he painstakingly records his days in lined notebooks, crammed with entries in blue ink.

“I use the notebook to remember who I helped today, how much farm work I did, whether there was rain … the notebook is my memory,” said Chen, who lives with his stepmother, Wang Miao-cyong, 65, in a remote village in Hsinchu County, northwestern Taiwan.

“I once lost one of my notebooks. I was so sad that I was crying and asked my dad to help me find it.”

Since his father died four years ago, Chen and his stepmother have lived on a government disability allowance and a small income they get from farming fruit and vegetables, which they barter with neighbors, some of whom call Chen “notebook boy.”

Dr Lin Ming-teng, head of the psychiatry department at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, said Chen has made remarkable progress despite his extensive brain damage.

“From the X-ray, we can see a large part of his brain in black – these are the sections that were operated on after the traffic accident,” Lin said.

“After losing such a substantial portion of his brain, it is quite amazing for him to achieve what he is doing now,” Lin said, adding that Chen could only remember things he had done in the last five to 10 minutes.

Lin said the damage had also affected Chen’s ability to receive and process information.

“This has an effect on his relationship with his mother, too, as sometimes his mother cannot get over the fact that he forgets things,” Lin said.

Wang longs to go back to her hometown in Indonesia, but she feels she cannot leave Chen alone.

“If I leave, who will take care of my son? I can’t imagine his future after I die.”

For now, Chen’s notebooks allow him to preserve some semblance of order in his life.

“October 26 go to Beipu alone, Chen clan organization, go find phone, go Catholic church, Citian Temple, 10:38 ZZZ,” reads one poignant note about a day he spent searching for, and praying to find, his lost mobile phone.

Ten days later, he found his phone, documenting the find in his notebook, of course.
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Some may be familiar with mythical sea monsters. For example, Scotland’s infamous Loch Ness Monster “Nessie,” and Giganto — fictional beasts of comic book fame. But millions of years ago, real-life sea monsters lived and thrived in what we now call the South Atlantic Ocean.

South Atlantic Ocean basin

As the continents of South America and Africa separated millions of years ago, scientists say a fantastic array of ferocious predators and other lifeforms colonized the newly formed body of water off the coast of Angola.

That diverse collection of marine reptiles included mosasaurs (aquatic lizards), plesiosaurs (which exhibited broad flat bodies, large paddlelike limbs, and typically a long flexible neck and small head), and the more familiar giant sea turtles.

But a catastrophic asteroid that hit earth 66 million years ago wiped most of them out, according to scientists.

Ancient fossils

​Today, thanks to a project called Projecto PaleoAngola among Angolan, American, Portuguese and Dutch researchers, paleontologists have been able to visit the coastal cliffs of Angola to excavate and study what remains of these giant animals.  

“We knew that there were fossils there, we just didn’t know how good they would be,” says Louis Jacobs, collaborating curator and professor emeritus of paleontology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

“Nobody had been there, so this was a vast, unknown terrain and we wanted to get there.”

A 72-million year-old ecosystem

What the team of paleontologists discovered was a treasure trove, giving them an unprecedented look into a strange yet familiar ecosystem.

In addition to mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and sea turtles, there were fossilized remains of a variety of fish and other marine life forms.

While mosasaurs have been known to exist on all continents and are relatively common in certain places, this particular sample is the largest collection of southern hemisphere mosasaurs known, according to the paleontologists.

 

“It’s certainly the best locality for these kinds of animals in sub-Saharan Africa and it could be one of the best in the world,” Jacobs said.

Rediscovering a lost world

Eleven authentic fossils from Angola’s ancient seas, full-size reconstructions of a mosasaur and an ancient sea turtle are on display for the first time in a new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, titled “Sea Monsters Unearthed: Life in Angola’s Ancient Seas.”

There are also 3-D scanned replicas of mosasaur skulls, and photo-murals and video vignettes transport visitors to field sites along Angola’s modern rugged coast, where Projecto PaleoAngola scientists unearthed the fossil remains from this lost world.  

Jacobs, who was part of a team of scientists and students at SMU that helped prepare the fossils for the Smithsonian exhibit, says any visitor “can look and see and compare how the ecosystem and its animals of the cretaceous of 72 million years ago are similar to ecosystems today in the same general areas.”

“The species are different, but the ecological jobs of the species are very similar,” he added.

Giant lizards

Michael Polcyn, senior research fellow at SMU, pointed out an example in the exhibit.

Standing in front of a fossil skull and partial skeleton of a mosasaur, he described the reptile as an “optimized fish eater.”

“You see the long narrow snout, the interlocking teeth — this would be similar to what you would see in the ocean today, in a dolphin for instance,” he said.

He gestured to a graphic posted on the display case depicting a rough toothed dolphin which it described as “the analog for the animal in the modern ecosystem.”

Shell-crushing mosasaur

Another great example of diversity within that ancient ecosystem is the hardshell-eating mosasaur, Polcyn said, which preyed on large oysters which were almost a meter (three feet) across.

“They were really big, so to crack an oyster three feet across you needed the dentition and the musculature to do that, and that’s what you see here in these very strange mushroom-shaped teeth that you see in this animal,” Polcyn explained.

Within the same ecosystem was another example of a top predator, the Prognathodon kianda. Its full-scale skeleton on display in the museum is almost eight meters long.

In addition to top predators like the monster-like mosasaur, the exhibit also includes fossils of gentler creatures; small fish and an ancient giant sea turtle.

“We have a snapshot of this moment in time 72 million years ago that has preserved all of these animals that were living together in one place,” Polcyn said.

The big dig

Jacobs says the fossil find in Angola was a big deal for a number of reasons:

“First of all because it’s going into a country that never really had a heritage of fossils,” he said. “It basically was unknown at the level that we are opening it up.”

“Fossils,” he says, “instill a sense of pride in what’s in the country, and it provides something to use for education, and it builds science. And the way it builds science is because every country has fossils, so every country has something to offer, so every country is a piece of the puzzle and the Angola piece is now there.”

Michael Polcyn agrees that unearthing this cache of ancient fossils has been a huge breakthrough on a number of fronts.

“From a purely scientific point of view it gives us an incredible window into an ecosystem 72 million years ago that is relatively complete,” he says. “From a very human point of view this really shows the people of Angola, and the people of the world, what incredible resources we have in our natural environments.”

And lastly, he says, “These fossils are the patrimony of Angola, these are their heritage, and for us to be able to bring them to the Smithsonian and ultimately back to Angola, on a very personal level, is a thrill for us.”

 
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Chinese health and medical ethics authorities started an investigation on Monday into claims by a scientist who released videos on YouTube saying he had altered the genes of twins born earlier this month, creating the first gene edited babies.

The Southern University of Science and Technology in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, where the scientist, He Jiankui, holds an associate professorship, said it had been unaware of the research project and that He had been on leave without pay since February.

He Jiankui defended what he claimed to have achieved, saying he had performed the gene editing to help protect the babies from future infection with the AIDS virus.

But his university said it was a “serious violation of academic ethics and standards” and scientists around the world condemned it as monstrous and dangerous.

The university issued a statement after He said in five videos posted on Monday that he used a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of twin girls.

China’s National Health Commission said it was “highly concerned” and had ordered provincial health officials “to immediately investigate and clarify the matter”.

“We have to be responsible for the people’s health and will act on this according to the law,” it said in a statement.

Shenzhen’s medical ethics committee said it was investigating the case. The Guangdong provincial health commission was also looking into it, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, a state media outlet.

He said in one YouTube video that the editing process, which he called gene surgery, “worked safely as intended” and that the resulting twins were “as healthy as any other babies.” It was impossible to verify the claims as He did not provide any written documentation of his research.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a technology that allows scientists to essentially cut-and-paste DNA, raising hope of genetic fixes for disease. However, there are also concerns about its safety and ethics.

“If true, this experiment is monstrous,” said Julian Savulescu, a medical ethics specialist at Britain’s University of Oxford.

Kathy Niakan, an expert at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “If true…this would be a highly irresponsible, unethical and dangerous use of genome editing technology.”

China’s Southern University of Science and Technology It said He is on unpaid leave until 2021.

“Southern University of Science and Technology strictly requires scientific research to conform to national laws and regulations and to respect and comply with international academic ethics and standards,” it said.

Asked for his comment on the university’s statement, He said he had been on voluntary leave for several years to focus on his research, without specifying dates.

In the videos, He defended his work, saying in one: “I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology. And I’m willing to take the criticism for them.”

In an earlier email to Reuters, He said that he planned to share data about the trial at a scientific forum this week. He said he planned for it to also go “through the peer review process, and through a pre-print soon.” A pre-print is a publication of findings made before the research is published in a peer-reviewed journal.

In an earlier telephone interview and emails with Reuters, He said he was aiming to bestow on the gene edited babies “lifetime protection” against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

He said he began his work in the second half of 2017 and enrolled eight couples. All of the potential fathers involved were HIV-positive. Five chose to implant embryos, including the parents of the twin girls, identified only by the pseudonyms Mark and Grace. The babies’ names are Lulu and Nana, He said in one video.
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