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các nhà khoa học cho gấu chạy thử trên máy chạy, và kết luận rằng nó cũng... không thích leo dốc :D

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Grizzly bears (gấu xám Bắc-Mỹ) can run really fast—but not for very long, and they seem to prefer not to. In fact, new research shows that bears are partial to the same kinds of hiking trails (đi bộ đường dài) and walking speeds (tốc độ) as humans, despite not being the most energy efficient (hiệu quả/tối ưu năng lượng) for their ursine (kiếu gấu) bodies.

Scientists trained nine captive grizzly bears to walk and run on a special treadmill (máy chạy bộ) (usually used for horses) placed in a custom, sealed enclosure of steel and plastic. The research team had individual bears walk for about 6 minutes each at varying speeds and gradients (đường dốc, độ dốc) (i.e. inclines), keeping the animals motivated with a constant stream of apple slices (cho gấu ăn táo để khuyến khích). The sealed enclosure allowed the scientists to then measure how the bears’ oxygen consumption (hấp thụ oxy) differed as they strolled (đi tản bộ) on the exercise machine, giving a good measure of the animals’ metabolic rates (tốc độ trao đổi chất).

The team found that the most energy efficient walking speed for the bears was about 4.2 kilometers per hour (or about 2.7 mph), despite GPS data from bears in the wild showing that grizzlies usually only travel at about 0.6 meters per second—or a little less than a mile and a half per hour, which is about how fast humans walk. The GPS data also showed that wild grizzlies mostly stuck to trails with gentler gradients, probably to conserve energy. The findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Researchers also found that bears are pretty bad at maintaining high speeds (rất kém trong việc duy trì tốc độ cao).

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