Welcome to Fat Bear Week at Mashable! Each fall, Katmai National Park holds a competition as Alaska’s brown bears finish fattening up for their long winter hibernation. This year, Mashable is getting in on the salmon-munching action. Check back with us all week as we follow the fat bear face-offs each day, and remember to get your votes in for each round. Happy fishing!

After consuming exceptional quantities of salmon this summer, Bear 409 “Beadnose” has triumphed as the 2018 Fat Bear Week champion.

She toppled a formidable contender in Bear 747, a dominant male bear whose enriched belly nearly scraped the ground.

Both bears — voted upon by the public on Katmai National Park’s Facebook page — are unquestionably victors in their wild bear world, an Alaskan subarctic environment where snow has already fallen, and the winter looms large. 

Simply put, the fatter a bear, the more likely it is to survive a six-month long winter hibernation.

“Both Beadnose and 747 demonstrated success in a challenging environment,” Mike Fitz, an ecologist and former Katmai ranger, said over email. “They showed that their skill and experience can reap big caloric rewards.”

Katmai National Park began the online Fat Bear Week competition three years ago as a way to relate the ursine ongoings in one of the most remote national parks to the greater public. (To get there, you must take a floatplane into the deep Alaskan wilderness and land on a glacial lake).

This season featured 13 bears that rangers observed fattening up between June and September. 

Each of them, munching 4,500-calorie rich sockeye salmon throughout the summer, became noticeably engorged — though none quite as fat as bears 747 and 409.

Bear 409 became something of an internet sensation after Katmai tweeted a gif of her transformation from skinny to fat over the course of the summer. 

She’s also a well-known mother to several past cub litters, benefited this summer by not having any cubs. She didn’t need to share any fish with her largely helpless offspring, and had the weight gain to show for it. 

Conversely, Bear 435 “Holly” — a mother bear famous for once “adopting” an abandoned cub, had two excitable cubs in tow. Holly, while certainly fattening up, was unable to put on the extreme weight she has in past years when she was roaming the river as a lone bear. Bear 435 lost in the Fat Bear Week quarterfinals.

SEE ALSO: An appreciation of Holly, the fat bear mom who adopted and raised an abandoned cub

Fat Bear Week, in all its online glory, has come to its 2018 end. But it’s quite likely both bears 747 and 409 will be back next summer, and consuming copious amounts of salmon under the watchful eyes of the explore.org webcams.

These wild animals live in a far-off realm — a land of lynx, bald eagles, wolverines, and rivers turned red with fish. But the web gives us a glimpse into their wild world; a world in which this year, 409 proved to be the fattest of all the fat bears.

Dyson wants to curl your hair… with air.

Not satisfied with disrupting hair dryers, Dyson is applying its air-blasting motor tech to breathe new life into another area of personal haircare: curlers and stylers. The Dyson Airwrap can curl hair, add volume, or get frizzy hair under control. And it does so without the extreme heat that can sometimes cause damage, instead using jets of air to grab and style the hair, one shock at a time.

SEE ALSO: 7 of the best robot vacuums to tackle pet hair

The Airwrap is the second product Dyson has made for the personal-care market, the first being the Supersonic hair dryer. Like the Supersonic, the Airwrap uses a tiny version of the company’s V9 motor that run at 110,000 rpm’s to blast air at high speed.

Also like the Supersonic (and every Dyson product for that matter), the Airwrap commands a hefty premium above what most folks are used to paying for personal haircare products. Whereas a search on Amazon reveals most curling irons are priced below $50, the Dyson Airwrap starts at $499.99. Even comparing to just stylers that use hot air, like this one from Conair, that’s stratospherically high.

Still, this is Dyson, so the high price tag is expected. And from what Dyson showed me — I got a chance to check out the Airwrap in a demo session in advance of Tuesday’s unveiling — the styler does its job extremely well.

How the Airwrap works

The Airwrap itself looks just like a lightsaber handle: a glossy, dark gray tube with an air-intake filter on the bottom (the perforated filter pops on and off easily thanks to magnets) and a purple-colored rim on the top end, where the air comes out. There are three switches close to the top for controlling the air flow and temperature. It’s also very lightweight — although keep in mind you need to plug it in to use it.

The curler and brush heads attach to the top, each with similar purple-and-gray colors. The curling heads are roughly cylindrical, with arrows on them to tell you the direction of air flow. The rush of air over the surface of the head creates what’s called the Coanda effect, which naturally pulls things closer — in this case, hair.

I had never used a curling iron before, so a stylist, Jon Reyman of Spoke & Weal in New York, walked me through my first experience with the Airwrap. Holding a shock of hair (not mine — one of the PR reps was kind enough to lend her hair for the exercise) in one hand, I put the Airwrap underneath and turned it on. Instantly the hair curled itself around the styler, and the closer I moved it toward the person’s head, the more hair became wrapped in the Airwrap’s effect.

While the Airwrap does use heated air, it never heats it beyond 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the company says. Reyman told me that many curling and straightening products on the market today take temperatures up past 400 degrees Fahrenheit, which can cause “catastrophic” damage to hair.

After curling the hair for a few seconds (no more than five), I gave it a “cold shot” of cool air for a second and then turned it off. Pulling the Airwrap away, the blonde shock fell away easily, and instead of straight hair, there was a gentle curl.

“Dyson has created what I think is a better mousetrap,” Reyman said after we were done. “This [kind of curl] isn’t possible without using extreme heat.”

Of course, one shock of curl on a head full of straight hair wasn’t going to fly for our model, so we broke out a different head to reverse the process. While the Airwrap isn’t a hair straightener per se, there are two brush heads that are meant to smooth out frizzy hair and get voluminous curls under control. A few strokes with the Airwrap using a brush head with soft bristles and her hair was passably straight again.

The Airwrap also includes a “pre-styling dryer” head that looks just like the Supersonic. So you could theoretically get the Airwrap to not just be your styler, but your hair dryer as well, although the Supersonic has its own heads and features to give you more flexibility in that regard.

Whether you use a separate hair dryer or not, the Airwrap does have a drying effect, and it’s intended to be used on damp hair.

“[Normally,] I’ll have to blow dry hair and then, if I wanted a curl, I’d have to use a curler, so I’m doing a two-step process,” said Reyman. “Here, I can take the hair while it’s still damp and work it. So it’s a shorter process.”

Beauty disruption

Dyson is very clear that the Airwrap is aimed at consumers looking for an easy and effective do-everything styling solution, not stylists who already favor professional equipment.

Since everyone has different hair with different needs, it’s offering three different packages, with different sets of heads. All three packages some with the pre-styling dryer and two 1.2-inch curlers.

• The Volume+Shape set comes with a soft brush for adding body and volume and a round brush for shaping fine, straight hair ($499.99).

• The Smooth+Control set comes with a firm brush for straightening and calming down frizzy hair and two 1.6-inch curlers for larger curls ($499.99)

• Then there’s the “Complete” package: two of each curler, all three brushes, and the pre-styling dryer ($549.99).

Yes, $500-$550 is a pretty big chunk of change, no matter what package you go for. But from my brief time with the Airwrap, I came away quite impressed. As a curling novice, I felt confident using it after learning the basics, and since it never gets too hot, I wasn’t dissuaded by any potential damage I might do.

Plus there’s something to be said about never having to worry you might burn the house down.

The Google Home Hub is aptly named.

It’s certainly not the first product to lay claim to the term “hub” but it might be the first product to embody the word so fully. It’s not centered around a single use case — like, say, the Facebook Portal is built around video chat — but instead brings together the functionalities of several different products: smart speaker, tablet, digital photo frame, and smart home controller.

SEE ALSO: Google’s Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover

The Home Hub is technically in the category of “smart display,” but that doesn’t capture what it does any better than “smart speaker” describes an Amazon Echo. The Hub is more of an “ambient computing enabler,” with some interesting extras that the display bestows.

At first glance, you might think the Home Hub is Google’s answer to the Echo Show, and it kind of is, but Google explicitly didn’t include a camera on the device. The reasoning here, according to product lead Diya Jolly, is simple: privacy. Since Google wants the Hub to be appropriate for every room in your house — especially the bedroom — it didn’t want to even hint that this product could ever be literally watching you.

While you might think this is an overreaction to the constant criticism Google endures over privacy issues, it’s arguably a wise move. Even Amazon, which has generally been immune to many of the data scandals of the past year, raised eyebrows when it unveiled its Echo Look product, which is essentially a connected camera for the bedroom. Lots of people simply won’t put a permanent camera in their most personal spaces, no matter what.

“Our take was: there are enough devices with a camera,” Jolly told me in an interview after the event. “Let’s give users a device they feel comfortable putting anywhere in their home. And if they want a device with a camera, there are a bunch of Google Assistant devices with a camera.”

The Google Home Hub is small. Some might call it cute, but the 7-inch screen is tiny by today’s standards for anything that isn’t a phone. If that seems odd to you, remember: This isn’t supposed to be a screen you linger over to make calls or watch movies. The onscreen content is meant to complement whatever real-world task you’re trying to accomplish. If I want help fixing a cabinet, it’s more important I get the right YouTube video than whatever the video quality is.

Not that the quality was bad. Looking closely at the Home Hub shortly after Google’s big hardware keynote, I thought the colors, resolution, and brightness were all just fine — certainly on par with what I’d expect from a nice tablet or laptop these days. Google hasn’t given the official resolution, strangely, but we’ll look more closely in our full review of the device.

One of the features Google talked up is Ambient EQ, which lets the screen automatically adjust color and brightness to match the room light. Google had three separate demo rooms set up, and the Hub looked perfectly ordinary in each — which was the point. Ambient EQ helps the Hub blend, preventing the screen from obnoxiously “screaming” at you visually. In a dark room with the lights out, the Hub displayed the time as a couple of ghostly, barely there floating numbers, with none of that telltale room glow that most lit screens create.

Ambient EQ helps a lot in the feature I was impressed with the most during my hands-on: being a digital picture frame. From a distance, in a side-by-side comparison with a physical photograph, it was hard to tell which was the Hub and which was the print (up close, the glossy reflection of the screen gave the Hub away). Even better, the Hub again didn’t exhibit any tacky, look-at-me glow — probably the worst thing about digital picture frames of old.

“As your home gets full of devices, it begins to feel less like a home,” says Jolly. “Bright screens are not very pleasant to the eyes, which takes away from home ambiance. With Ambient EQ, we wanted to make sure the device blended into your home — that it was there when you need it, and it wasn’t there when you didn’t need it.”

I also have to give Google props for this photo innovation: a (potentially) better way to display vertical photos on a horizontal screen. Instead using black bars or a blurred background, the Hub will instead put two photos side by side. Seems dumb and too simple, but the Google twist is that it’ll intelligently make sure the photos are related — by place, time, subject, etc. — without you having to do anything. It’ll also make sure those screenshots and blurry pics aren’t part of the mix.

Of course, one of the key things about the Hub is that it’s a hub, able to control smart home functions integrated with Google Home. That’s expected of course, and I saw canned demos of Home doing all kinds of things like helping with recipes in the kitchen to locking your front door. The real test with smart home stuff is in the details, such as how well the Hub’s microphone array can hear commands from across a room and to what extent Google Assistant can account for variations in natural language.

I didn’t get a chance to do much with the Home Hub, audio-wise, but it doesn’t seem to be looking to compete with serious speakers like the Google Home Max. Audio on a YouTube recipe came through loud and clear in an 8 x 8-foot demo cube, but I have serious doubts how well it will be able to compete for attention in a loud kitchen. Again, I’ll have to wait until I can fully test it to know for sure.

Despite its diminutive size, Google’s first official smart screen is a compelling device. It’s probably not as useful as the demos make it seem — you’ll need to buy pretty fully into both the smart home and Google itself to really make full use of it. But without the camera, it’s an easier sell to get it into more rooms. And if, in the end, Google has only succeeded in creating a digital picture frame that isn’t garbage, $149 sounds like a steal.