SULUKTU, KYRGYZSTAN (AFP) – Hundreds of metres underground, Emylbek Umarov hacks out lumps of coal by hand with a pickaxe in a dank mine in a remote mountainous corner of Kyrgyzstan.

Coal may be falling out of favour elsewhere because of climate change, but Suluktu’s mines hope growing demand from neighbouring Central Asian countries and beyond will help them return to their Soviet heyday.

For some, like Umarov, the mine is one of the few places offering work – despite the threat of accidents that have killed dozens of people in the area in recent years.

“It’s terrifying, it’s tough, but there’s no other work here,” said the 27-year-old, who has two degrees in computing and economics.

As he spoke, the coughing of miners with blackened faces echoed through the tunnels illuminated by a few lamps hanging from a ceiling dripping with water.

The men work with jackhammers, pickaxes and explosives on 12-hour shifts day or night 15 days a month for a monthly salary of less than EUR150.

Before starting their shifts, they have to travel an hour to the mine in large Russian-made Kamaz trucks along a badly rutted road.

The hulks of Soviet-era machinery can be seen in the pinkish dawn.

Tucked away in the mountains, the town of Suluktu was founded in 1868 and is one of the oldest coal extraction hubs in Central Asia.

From the “miner’s bread” on sale in local bakeries to the local football team called Shakhtar (miner) – everything in the town is a reminder of its main industry, including the coal dust coating the ground.

Suluktu “heated Central Asia during Soviet times”, said its mayor, Maksat Kadyrkulov.

Like settlements across the former Soviet Union, it suffered from deindustrialisation after its collapse, leading to a sharp drop in population and coal output.

“There is no farmland here. We just dig coal and there is no family without a miner,” Kadyrkulov said.

The mayor said he hoped Suluktu would recover its “past glory” thanks to growing demand for coal.

The Soviet era is a constant presence in the town. On its outskirts stands a monument depicting two miners with a four-metre-high hammer and sickle.

Trucks filled with coal file past the statues on their way to deliver their cargo to Uzbekistan and beyond since access to nearby Tajikistan is now closed off because of a flare-up of tensions along the border.

A mosaic nearby extols the glory of Soviet power, showing a miner with a red star behind him.

Before “we were proud to be miners”, said 64-year-old Nimadjan Abdulayevich, who spent 37 years in the mines, his voice hoarse from throat cancer.

While there have been no fatal accidents in the mine where Umarov works, the risk is constant.

“The mine is like a second front. You risk dying there,” is a phrase that miners often repeat.

Last year, the metal bars holding up the vein where Umarov was working collapsed, breaking his leg. “Since then, the fear remains,” he said.

His father Dzhumbai, who now works on the surface as a welder, was caught up in a similar accident.

Mine director Kanynbek Ismailov said he lacked the resources for new equipment, even though the conditions in the mine are among the best of the 40 or so in Suluktu. “We do everything by hand. We do not have new equipment,” Ismailov said.

PARIS (AFP) – Even as animals and plants face widespread extinction from human-driven causes like climate change, the natural world continues to inspire scientific discovery in unexpected ways.

“Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years optimising elegant solutions to extremely complicated problems,” said a biomedical engineer at the University of California in Irvine Alon Gorodetsky.

“So if we look to nature, we can shortcut our development process and get to a valuable solution right away,” he told AFP.

From squid-skin food warmers to a lubricant made of cow mucous, here is a selection of this year’s scientific work inspired by nature.

Stopping the bleeding hearts and livers of dogs and rabbits without stitches may now be possible with a biodegradable plaster made of sticky okra gel.

Okra is a fuzzy green vegetable with a slimy texture that inspired Malcolm Xing from Canada’s University of Manitoba to turn it into a medical adhesive.

“Okra is a fantastic material,” said Xing.

In the July study published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, researchers discovered that refining okra in a juicer and then drying it into a powder creates an effective bioadhesive that quickly creates a physical barrier and starts the blood clotting process.

The researchers plan to test this plaster on humans in the coming years.

Snot may invoke feelings of disgust, but laboratory tests found that a lubricant made of cow mucous showed promise at curtailing the spread of certain sexually transmitted infections.

The study, published in Advanced Science in September, is very preliminary, however. It has not yet been tested on humans and should not replace other forms of protection, like condoms.

Researchers extracted the mucous from the salivary glands of cows and turned it into a gel that binds to and constraints viruses. Mucous is made of a protein called mucin that might have antiviral properties.

It is also both a solid and a liquid.

“Being a solid, it can trap bacteria or viruses in the body. Being a liquid, it can clear those pathogens from the body,” said study co-author Hongji Yan from Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Fireflies that light up the night sky inspired scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create tiny, bug-sized robots that emit light when they fly.

The glowing artificial muscles help the honey bee-sized robots communicate with each other, which may make them useful for search and rescue missions someday.

Though the robots can only operate in a laboratory environment so far, the researchers are excited at their potential future uses.

There are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants in the world, and researchers have discovered that one species might be able to sniff out cancer in human breasts.

In a study conducted at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and published on the preprint server bioRxiv, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, scientists used a sugar-water reward to train ants to smell the difference between mouse urine implanted with, and without, human tumours.

While dogs can be trained to use their super noses to detect cancer, this is expensive and takes time.

Ants might provide a cheaper, albeit less cute, alternative. The strange skin of squids has inspired a packaging material that can keep coffee and food warm for as long, or as little, as wanted, according to a March study published in Nature Sustainability.

Squids have miniature organs called chromatophores that can drastically change the size, and also help them change colour.

To mimic “these pigment-filled organs”, study co-author Alon Gorodetsky, from the University of California, Irvine, said they developed “little metal islands that you could move apart” and contract.

The heat level can then be controlled by how much the material is stretched.

“If you put it around a warm object – for example, a coffee-filled cup or a hot sandwich – you can control the rate at which it cools down,” he said.