Polar bears aren't actually white.Turns out, they can come in all sorts of colors: yellow, gray, orange, and even green. That's because polar bear fur is transparent and hollow.When light strikes ...
Bodil Holst at the University of Bergen in Norway and her colleagues have shown that the ice resistance of polar bear fur is due to natural oils secreted onto the hairs, rather than a property of ...
Polar bears need all the help they can get to survive their frosty Arctic environment. One of their biggest survival secrets appears to be greasy hair. The sebum–or hair grease–on their fur ...
“Unwashed, greasy hair made it much harder for ice to stick. In contrast, when the polar bear fur was washed and the grease largely removed it performed similarly to human hair, to which ice ...