The polar bears are all right

Environmental alarmists have depicted polar bears as sick and starving victims of global warming, but a new, comprehensive report by one of the world’s leading polar bear experts found just the opposite.

An in-depth analysis by Susan Crockford with the Global Warming Policy Foundation says polar bears are thriving. Surveys indicated polar bear populations were higher than ever since an international treaty in 1973 enacted protections for them.

Although summer sea ice thickness has declined, spring and early summer sea ice measurements have remained adequate for the bear populations. And the summer ice decline actually offers more abundant food sources for the bears because their prey prefer thinner ice habitats, according to the report.

Crockford also noted that Arctic sea ice thickness has always varied considerably, sometimes measuring less than it does now, and polar bear populations vary naturally in response to changing conditions.

Environmental organizations use starving polar bears as poster children for catastrophic consequences of climate change, issuing dire warnings that polar bears could disappear completely from the Arctic in the next 100 years. In December 2017, a National Geographic video of a starving polar bear went viral and stirred much public compassion. But the video, Crockford said, showed a bear suffering from cancer or some other condition that made it unable to hunt, not starving from a lack of food sources.

Some studies show declines in average weights of polar bears since 1980, but Crockford found no recorded increase in the number of bears starving to death or too thin to reproduce. Most bears are in good to excellent condition, she said.

Cal Beisner, founder of Stewardship of Creation, noted those who predicted disaster for polar bears made the same mistake as those who overestimated the causes and consequences of climate change. “Just as is the case with fears of dangerous man-made global warming, those making the claim [that polar bears will die out] depend entirely on computer models, models that are at best not verified and at worst falsified by empirical observation,” he wrote on his organization’s blog.

An undated photo of Amelia Earhart Associated Press

Remains found in 1940 likely Earhart’s

Bones found in 1940 on Nikumaroro, a remote island in the South Pacific, may belong to Amelia Earhart, according to a new study published in the journal Forensic Anthropology. Earhart, the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappeared somewhere over the Pacific during a 1937 attempt to fly around the world.

A physician originally analyzed the bones found on Nikumaroro and said they came from a man. But now, using modern techniques, Richard Jantz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, determined the bones came from a woman, likely Earhart.

Jantz calculated the lengths of Earhart’s humerus and radius bones from a photograph of her that also included an object to determine scale. He estimated the length of her tibia from measurements of her clothing. When he compared those measurements to those of the bones, they matched. Earhart “was known to have been in the area of Nikumaroro Island, she went missing, and human remains were discovered, which are entirely consistent with her and inconsistent with most other people,” Jantz said in a statement. —J.B

An undated photo of Amelia Earhart Associated Press

Hearing in color

Synesthesia, a rare neurologic condition that is estimated to affect about 5 percent of the population, has baffled scientists for more than 130 years. People with synesthesia experience an automatic and involuntary crossed response to certain sensory triggers. For example, hearing a musical note may cause a person to see a certain color or smell a certain scent.

Until now, the cause of this mysterious ailment eluded scientists because of the subjective nature of the symptoms. But new gene sequencing techniques finally enable researchers to investigate what drives these strange sensory experiences.

In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers performed genetic testing on people with synesthesia that mingles the senses of hearing and vision. They found that those people possessed DNA variants that appeared to cause nerve cells in the areas of the brain that process auditory and visual information to become hyperconnected during early childhood development.

The findings may help research into the causes of autism spectrum disorders, which scientists suspect also involve abnormal nerve connections, Science magazine reported. —J.B.

Lights out

Having trouble getting your preschooler to fall asleep at night? Dimming lights and eliminating screen time before bed may help, according to a new study published in the journal Physiological Reports.

Other studies have indicated bright lights can affect adult sleep patterns, but the new research shows that young children are even more susceptible to light exposure. The researchers found even an hour of bright light before bedtime almost completely shuts down preschoolers’ production of melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone. Melatonin also stays suppressed for at least 50 minutes after lights go out.

Young children have larger pupils and more transparent lenses, which makes them more vulnerable to the effects of light, lead researcher Monique LeBourgeois said in a statement. LeBourgeois attributed at least part of the problem to the growing use of electronic media among young children, which has tripled since 2011: “The preschool years are a very sensitive time of development during which use of digital media is growing more and more pervasive.” —J.B.