Their winter survival trick is a months-long power-save mode--and scientists think it could help humans, too. This bear woke up like this. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For many animals that live in cold climates, winter means low-power mode. But no creature is more tied to the image of a long, cozy winter than hibernating bears all snuggled up in their dens.

The best science fiction blends reality and imagination, so a viewer walks away contemplating the limits of human possibility. The worst take leaps of faith that toss a viewer into an oblivion of head scratching. Passengers, a space thriller directed by the Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum and starring Hollywood mainstays Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, begins in the first category before rocketing into the second. In the film, Avalon -- a commercial starship -- ferries more than 5,000 colonists on a voyage from Earth to a new home world called Homestead II. To survive the 120-year trip, the travelers are placed into induced hibernation, but an accident rouses Chris Pratt's character -- mechanical engineer Jim Preston -- 90 years early.

On cold, dark days it is tempting to imagine shutting yourself away until the warmer weather returns. Many animals do it by entering a state known as torpor, which reduces their bodily functions to a minimum and uses fat stores in their body for energy, but could humans ever hibernate in the same way? Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford has explained what torpor does to the body and how it could affect the human body in an article for The Conversation. An expert has explained what torpor - or the act of shutting the body down during hibernation - does to the body and how it could affect humans. A'therapeutic torpor' could make a manned mission to Mars more feasible.