Bears use hibernation to regenerate their wounds without a hint of scarring
When bears go to sleep for months at a time, their heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature drop to almost nothing. Despite this, their bodies apparently go into overdrive in other areas, healing wounds so that they’re good as new.
This really should be impossible, considering most mammals pretty much lose the ability to heal wound effectively the moment their body temperatures start to drop. And yet somehow American black bears use hibernation as the time to heal all wounds, unleashing a supercharged immune response that erases all hints of infection and injuries. In their new paper, researchers from the Universities of Wyoming and Minnesota explain how they made this remarkable discovery:
“We identified a few animals each year with injuries resulting from gunshots or arrows from hunters; bite marks from other bears or predators. These wounds were considered to have been incurred some time before the bears denned, and were often infected or inflamed…in early winter. Yet typically, when we revisited bears in their dens a few months later, most wounds had completely resolved whether or not we [cleaned them], sutured the areas or administered antibiotics.”
The researchers were then able to confirm these results experimentally by tracking cuts on a small group of bears over a few months. The bears all entered hibernation with the wounds still in evidence, but by the time they awoke the wounds were gone, there was no sign of infection, and generally there was only the slightest wisp of scar tissue, if anything. Otherwise, it was as though the cuts had never happened - even hair had started to regrow over the wound. Exactly how bears pull off this healing trick is still an open question, but the researchers hope that their secret might be adapted to help humans better heal from their wounds as well, although hopefully without having to sleep for six months, of course.
Healing Factor
Yo Man Go!Healing Factor - Yo Man Go
“These are our walls, These are our arms, these are our hearts, These are our songs.”
Healing Factor
Yo Man, Go!Yo Man, Go! - Healing Factor
I can’t find this song anywhere else on Tumblr, so I’m upping it. It’s da best.
WE’LL FUCKING HEAL LIKE WOLVERINE, I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU, LIKE YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN THERE FOR ME.
On deadpool losing his powers
First off we need to remember that it’s not only the ability to heal he’s lost. In a similar sense to captain america he gained:
- Agility/speed
- Reflexes
- Stamina
- Endurance
So all those have gone too and hopefully they will be acknowledged by D.Way. Oh and having Deadpool catch a cold or something after being in the sea or somewhere cold after losing his healing factor would be a nice touch.
TO THE MAIN POINT OF THIS POST
Point is now that Deadpool has lost all of these powers I hope he does something similar to when spidey lost his spidey sense.
LEARNS DEADPOOL-FU! or something similar anyway. Let Deadpool become the perfect assassin without his healing ability, so that when he gets them back, (Oh we all know he will) in a longed out Arc about deadpool being afraid to die, he will be back on his epic levels again!
Oh and having him actually do a merc job. That’d be nice.
Healing Factor Theory
In a skype chat, we got on the subject of healing factors, and wondering about hair, and the like. So, in response I came up with my own theories about how exactly a healing factor works.
Obviously, there’s the basic understanding that the body puts it’s regenerative properties into accelerated gears to heal wounds, fatal or otherwise. The question is, how does the body know exactly how to heal the body? Of course there’s DNA that dictates the basic structures, but that doesn’t account for renewing things like scars, or muscle mass that was accumulated over time through training the body, and even things like specific hair styles.
That’s where my theory kicks in. It utilizes hypothetical thing called a ‘meme’ which is analogous with genes. Though, instead of containing physical attributes weeded out through selective breeding, it’s a sort of recording of memories. Regardless of whether or not I’m using the words correctly, they serve to help ease the explanations. So, lets get on to the actual theory.
The theory is that these memes ‘record’ the current state of the body. Be it hairstyle, exact muscle mass, etc. Much like using a system restore on a computer to return it to a stable state, the healing factor taps into these memes and restores the body to a healthy state based on what the memes dictate.
To answer why hair doesn’t immediately regrow after being cut can simply be explained by the healing factor not recognizing the loss of hair as a threat or damage to the body. Just like changing your desktop background doesn’t cause your computer to explode, something cosmetic like a hair cut doesn’t cause your body to explode.
Of course, the healing factor isn’t always able to act quickly enough. For example, the character Deadpool has scars and such all over his body. This is the result of the advanced stages of cancer he has. Think of the healing factor, in this case, as an anti-virus program, and the cancer as a virus. As the healing factor rewrites one part, the cancer quickly comes up and corrupts it again resulting in the scarring. So, it’s not exactly a perfect system.
I hope that makes sense, and covers everything accordingly. If there’s any flaws in my reasoning then feel free to send me an ask.
