A video of a bear at a Chinese zoo has gone viral in recent days, as debate rages over whether the animal is in fact a human wearing a costume.
Originally released last Friday, the video shows a bear standing on its hind legs inside its enclosure at Hangzhou Zoo in Zhejiang province as visitors looked on.
Due to the bear's humanlike stance and folds of loose skin on its lower back, people online have questioned the animal's authenticity.
The zoo responded in a light-hearted manner, with Reuters reporting that it had posted a statement on WeChat role-playing as the bear.
“Yesterday, after I got off work, I received a call from the director, asking me if I was lazy and did not go to work, and had hired a two-legged animal to replace me,” it read.
“Some people think I stand like a person. It seems you don’t understand me very well.”
Zookeepers told the local newspaper Hangzhou Daily that the sun bear, which comes from Malaysia, is smaller than other bears and has a different appearance.
Sun bears, which are the smallest bears in the world, are only about the size of a large dog.
It added that local temperatures, which have reached almost 34°C in recent days, would make any bear costume-wearing human extremely uncomfortable.
London Zoo animal X-rays - in pictures
What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
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Anna and the Apocalypse
Director: John McPhail
Starring: Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming, Mark Benton
Three stars
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