It is 2,000 miles from Anchorage to the tip of the Aleutian Islands — which is geographically in the Eastern Hemisphere — and small communities spread across the region are some of the most isolated in the world, some with a hundred or more miles of ocean between them and the neighbors.

The weather is tough, and the supply line is long.

“Anything I eat that’s green comes out of a can, and it may be years old,” said Pat Pletnikoff, mayor of Saint George, in the Pribilof Islands.

State legislators are giving good marks, so far, for a state-sponsored study of a possible 24-inch natural gas pipeline built from the North Slope, but questions are beginning to emerge. A 737-mile pipeline would cost $7.52 billion in 2011 dollars, the study concluded, and could deliver gas to Interior and Southcentral Alaska by 2019.

Institutional investors are financial groups who make long-term investments, usually in major commercial projects like office buildings and shopping malls. They are scarce to almost non-existent in Alaska, however.

Why? A lot of reasons: Alaska is too far from Wall Street. The market is too small. It’s risky. It’s cold and dark, and everyone lives in igloos.

This really isn’t far from the image these firms have. They are almost all east coast-based and many don’t know much about what’s beyond the Rockies, much less Alaska.

FAIRBANKS — Scientists believe research on hibernation of black bears and ground squirrels at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology could contribute to treatment of heart attacks and strokes in humans as well as the long-term recovery of people after surgery and of soldiers’ recovery from battlefield wounds.

The U.S. Army is particularly interested in the latter and U.S. medical researchers are increasingly interested in the former. Both are helping fund work at the institute.