 TV so they could watch their soap operas there! They practically went to live on the bridge for two weeks and the company’s people couldn’t get in or out.
Eventually they had to move though. AGA sued the Mayor of Piedras Municipality for restricting their right to free movement and riot police dispersed the people for blocking public property. Some people were injured but nothing too bad thankfully.
What happened after that? Has the community found different ways to resist or were they scared off?
The company has been trying to scare the people by sending legal letters and things like that, but it won’t work. Some of the farmers say this threat from mining has awoken the Pijaos in them. The Pijaos are an Indigenous group famous for being warriors. The farmers have awoken their courage, they’d die for their land.
After the blockade was broken the community changed their strategy. They can’t occupy the bridge all day so they’ve installed an alarm nearby so whenever they see the company coming they can ring it and all rush down to block the bridge again. So that they aren’t on public property they moved their stall on to someone’s patio right by the bridge.
We’ve also been working on a democratic way of saying no to mining. In our constitution it says we have a right to a popular consultation, which is like a local referendum that allows us to have an input on decisions like allowing AGA to build the processing plant, pits and a dam. We made a formal request to the local government of Piedras Municipality to hold this consultation and got support from the Mayor. At the same time we were out informing other parts of the municipality about the dam and its effects.
How did people respond in the consultation?
It was amazing, a real triumph for democracy. Of 5,105 people eligible to vote in Piedras 3,007 turned out and 2,971 voted against mining developments. In Colombia over 50% of people must turn out to vote and you have to achieve a majority of over 1/3 to make it obligatory for the municipal government to uphold the decision of the people. We acheived that, so in this case they are saying no to mining developments and yes to protecting the environment in the municipality.
So Piedras Municipality and Doima are now off limits to mining developments?
Unfortunately it’s not so simple. The central government is very pro-mining and before the popular consultation in Piedras could even happen they made a decree (decree 934) that removed municipal governments’ abilities to decide on mining in their region.
This new decree basically prevents popular consultations being held on mining, and means the national government won’t take our 2,971 ‘no’ voters into account in their final decision on the mine.
The central government say they’ve done this because mining is a matter of public and national interest. I don’t know exactly who the nation or the public are, if not the people, but that’s what they said.
Have the Doima community or anyone else opposed the Government’s decree?
Absolutely. Things are changing day by day. The latest exciting news for us is that in September the Constitutional Court of Colombia suspended the central government’s decree (934). They declared it unconstitutional because it restricts the autonomy and democratic decision-making of municipalities, which is part of our constitution. Now the central government will have to accept our local decision, so that is some justice and a victory for us.
That’s great news, how have the people of Doima reacted to that. What’s next?
There’s a lot to do. Community leaders from Doima are reaching out to other municipalities in Tolima to convince them to hold popular consultations on mining and democratise the process further.
In Piedras mayoral elections are round the corner and the people of Doima have asked one of their leaders, Julian, as candidate. They know that AGA will make its formal bid for a license to mine, build a processing plant and a dam in the next four years so they want a strong mayor who they can count on to say no and uphold the popular consultation.
What do you think the effect of the resistance has been so far on Doima and Colombia more broadly?
The people of Doima have been really empowered by their experiences in this whole process of resistance. It has shown them and the whole country how a community can pressure the government to recognise gaps in environmental and mining laws and act on this pressure, representing the people’s interests as it should.
In Doima we have this saying that resistance is like a fire, you must keep feeding it and never let it go out. The people really want democracy, agriculture, and to keep their heritage. We will keep fighting against mining.90% of the day-to-day products used in the western world (N. America, Europe etc) have been imported, mostly from over-seas.
This includes not only exotic goods like coffee, tea and spices but also basic products such as grain, beans, wood, fuel and of course our consumer goods like the endless mountains of electrical appliances, plastics, clothes and everything else you can think of.
Why do we transport so much?
The reason why almost everything we buy, eat or use has originated in another place is that shipping has become so efficient, with large scale economic backing, that containerization and online logistic systems have virtually eliminated shipping costs.
This makes it possible for every entrepreneur to out-source to other countries and find the cheapest and least regulated production facilities. By doing this the costs of production drops, below any local producer, and make it more economically feasible to pay a cheaper price for the same item which has been produced abroad. The local product will soon be priced out of the market and its industry will cease to exist. With low shipping costs, that same cheap product can be transported to the major markets across the globe and remain economical for the merchant.
The whole system is a perfect storm of the combined forces of capitalism and global economy. With as a result you get the lowest possible price and the highest possible consumption.
The 50,000+ active cargo-carrying motor ships, the work horses of this logistical system, have a huge negative impact on air quality among many other things.
Sixteen of the biggest motor cargo ships emit as much sulphur as all the cars in the world combined. Those shipping emissions are deemed responsible for 50,000 pre-mature deaths annually from cancer and other illnesses. The shipping industry is responsible for emitting an amount of Green House Gasses comparable to a large country like Germany.
Yet, the real problem of this system of logistics is not just the GHG emissions. It is far worse: it is the unbelievable rocket-rise of consumerism and the demise of self-sustainable local economies, and all the damage to our ecosystems, climate and social relationships over-consumption brings along.
The re-introduction of sail power and the decline of transport by mechanical means would mean the costs of shipping would become fair again. Not only fair for the current generation of consumers but fair for the unborn generations to come.
This would take an astonishing but achievable revolution in transport and would require freight carriers and ship-owners to put clean propulsion technologies in the top tiers of their priorities. It should be considered the only morally responsible course of development in this field. This would give human (and non-human) societies a chance to not be wiped out by ecological disaster caused by our own economic system.Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

# Human oocytes and zygotes are ready for ultra-fast vitrification after 2 minutes of exposure to standard CPA solutions

## Abstract

Vitrification of human oocytes and embryos in different stages of development is a key element of daily clinical practice of in vitro fertilization treatments. Despite the cooling and warming of the cells is ultra-fast, the procedure as a whole is time consuming. Most of the duration is employed in a long (8–15 minutes), gradual or direct exposure to a non-vitrifying cryoprotectant solution, which is followed by a short exposure to a more concentrated vitrifying solution. A reduction in the duration of the protocols is desirable to improve the workflow in the IVF setting and reduce the time of exposure to suboptimal temperature and osmolarity, as well as potentially toxic cryoprotectants. In this work it is shown that this reduction is feasible. In silico (MatLab program using two-parameter permeability model) and in vitro observations of the oocytes’ osmotic behaviour indicate that the dehydration upon exposure to standard cryoprotectant solutions occurs very fast: the point of minimum volume of the shrink-swell curve is reached within 60 seconds. At that point, intracellular water ejection is complete, which coupled with the permeation of low molecular weight cryoprotectants results in similar intracellular and extracellular solute concentrations. This shows that prolonging the exposure to the cryoprotectant solutions does not improve the cytosolic glass forming tendency and could be avoided. To test this finding, human oocytes and zygotes that were donated for research were subjected to a shortened, dehydration-based protocol, consisting of two consecutive exposures of one-minute to two standard cryoprotectant solutions, containing ethylene glycol, dimethyl sulfoxide and sucrose. At the end of this two-minute dehydration protocol, the critical intracellular solute concentration necessary for successful vitrification was attained, confirmed by the post-warming survival and ability to resume cytokinesis of the cells. Further studies of the developmental competency of