Welcome to Fat Bear Week 2019! Katmai National Park's bears spent the summer gorging on 4,500-calorie salmon, and they've transformed into rotund giants, some over 1,000 pounds. The park is holding its annual playoff-like competition for the fattest of the fat bears (you can vote online between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8), and Mashable will be following the ursine activity.
Inside a bear's snout lies an extraordinary world.
The ursine nose is lined with a vast sheet of specialized tissue, called the epithelium, which is embedded with scent-detecting nerves. Like the human epithelium, these cells have the exceptional ability to regenerate themselves (unlike most other nerves). But a bear's epithelium dwarfs our own. "It is much, much larger than a human's," explained Heiko Jansen, a neuroscientist who researches human and animal physiology at Washington State University. "It's several orders of magnitude larger." Read more...
More about Fat Bear Week 2019, Science, and Animalsvia IFmashable.com
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