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“For polar bears, profound obesity is a benign state,” says Eline Lorenzen, a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley. “We wanted to understand how they are able to cope with that.”

“Polar bears have adapted genetically to a high fat diet that many people now impose on themselves,” says Rasmus Nielsen, of UC Berkeley’s Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics. “If we learn a bit about the genes that allows them to deal with that, perhaps that will give us tools to modulate human physiology down the line.”

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