Snakes are sneaky. In their 150 million-odd years on this planet, they’ve managed to slither their way into most corners of the world. But Saint Patrick can’t take credit for eliminating our scaly friends from any of them. Ireland, like pretty much all places with no snakes, never had them to begin with. Other regions are simply too frigid for them. As cold-blooded ectotherms, they rely on their environment to control their body temperature, so few species can live too close to the poles—at least for now....

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Using a technique called stable isotope analysis, researchers sampled the wings of a subset of a non-migratory population of monarchs located in south Florida. What they found was unexpected: Almost half of their sample—forty-eight percent—came from elsewhere. The monarchs had grown up as far away as the Midwest and Texas, parts of the monarch’s broad summer breeding range, which suggests that most of them made the trip deliberately, rather than just being blown off-course during their flight south....

According to Getty, it usually charges between $500 and $600 for “rights managed” images, of which photographers get 30 to 40 percent, and approximately $250 for non-exclusive use of images, (photographers get 20 percent of that). Good news to say the least, but why is Getty turning to Flickr? Simple: it wants to add authenticity to its own database. Also, the Flickr pool is appealing to advertisers, according to Getty’s co-founder and chief executive Jonathan Klein....

Within the lung, bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa take advantage of the altered salt concentration and the subsequent production of mucus to form biofilms leading to an increased chance for infection and respiratory complication. As for the fungi, they take advantage of the compromised immune system and find a home in the warm, moist, mucus-filled environment. Some species, such as Aspergillus fumigatus, are inherently pathogenic and must be dealt with immediately....

The M1 era of Apple laptops Apple laptops changed substantially starting in late 2020. The company stopped relying on Intel to make its processors and struck out to create its own system on a chip called the M1. It doesn’t simply replace the old Intel Core CPUs from previous models. The M1 encompasses almost all the major components, including the central processor, graphics processor, machine learning core—even system memory. Because Apple controls every component of hardware and software design, the parts all work together with unprecedented efficiency....

You can use pretty much anything, but for this article, we’re using chocolate wrappers, cracked eggshells, the shiny foil from old CDs, and headphone cables. If you’re yearning to work with resin, these funky cufflinks are a good place to start. Oh, and before you begin, feel free to crank up your favorite music and ease into some mindful meditation of a different kind. Stay safe, seriously The most important part about working with resin is knowing how to use it safely....

On Sunday, Zuck revealed his new year’s resolution in a status: While we here at Popular Science think a personal “Jarvis” is super cool, something else caught our eye as well. Facebook user Darlene Hackemer Loretto commented on the post, saying: And while Zuckerberg appreciated the sentiment, he had some advice for Darlene and her granddaughters: Popular Science strongly stands behind Zuck’s advice, and continues to encourage young inventors of all genders and races to pursue their passions and work hard....

747 is Katmai National Park and Preserve’s undisputed biggest bear, at around 1,400 pounds. He’s an adult male brown bear with a blocky muzzle and a floppy right ear. “In early summer, his reddish-brown fur sheds in a patchy manner. Like many adult males, he often has scars and wounds on his face and neck. In late summer and fall, he is typically very fat with a low-hanging belly and uniformly dark brown fur,” wrote the park and preserve....

But new images released on Tuesday reveal much more than a tasty space snack. Bennu appears to be spewing out dusty, gravel-sized debris, which is extremely rare behavior for an asteroid. “It’s one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,” Dante Lauretta, lead investigator of the mission, told The Atlantic‘s Marina Koren. It’s not immediately clear why Bennu is ejecting so many little bits from its surface. For one, it could be spinning so fast that it’s literally flying apart....

It’s a standard response. Mainly trying to convince people that they’re doing artists such a huge favor by displaying the work. They throw in the usual “everybody loves contests!” defense, as well as explaining that they are appealing to “amateur” or “hobby” artists. This is just as bad as their original message. Students and amateur artists, like many creatives, have been taught their whole lives that one can’t make a living off creative work....

But now those instruments will be used to register the aftershocks of the Sichuan event – the epicenter of which was just 250 miles away. They could give the scientists a detailed map of the structure of the Earth’s crust in the area. This, in turn, could give them a better idea of how the Three Gorges Dam itself would hold up in the even of serious shaking. There’s quite a bit at stake: 75 million people live downstream from the Dam....

But MOFAD had to first open, which it did earlier this week. The 3,000-square-foot space in the heart of Williamsburg (it used to house a parking garage), on which the museum holds a five-year lease, is far removed from the museums of elementary school class trips. “We wanted MOFAD to look like Willy Wonka meets the Eameses,” says Peter Kim, the museum’s executive director. The launch has been promised ever since Arnold birthed a Kickstarter in 2013 to raise funds for a MOFAD pop-up....

Dubbed Safeguard, it’s a virtual safety net. Users set parameters for a drone, and the machine checks those parameters to make sure it’s flying where it should be. If it ventures to the edge of the boundary, it’s supposed to fly back, and if it doesn’t do that, the safety net sends the drone crashing to the ground before it crosses into a “no-fly-zone”. Other boundary limitation tools for drones, like geofencing, rely on GPS signals hooked up to the drone’s autopilot....

Artemis, NASA’s mission to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, was supposed to launch in 2024. Vice President Mike Pence announced the deadline for the new mission in 2019 during a meeting with the White House’s space council, catching many at NASA and in the space industry by surprise—the space agency’s original return to the moon had been slated for 2028. NASA’s delay announcement Tuesday is the first official acknowledgement that the 2024 target is unrealistic....

The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven’s Challenge. (The lunch box appears to have actually been one from the film Frozen, and not a Taylor Swift lunchbox. I know, I’ll all shook up about it too). Besides the New York Army National Guard, 18 bomb squads from across the federal government, New York and other states, and even Canada took part....

“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” said Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb, in a press release. In 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its late 80’s flyby. Now, JWST has taken this crisp image of the planet’s rings—some of which have not been detected since that mission over three decades ago....

The researchers looked at the brains of seven patients who had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare degenerative brain disorder caused by infectious prions, small protein particles that are nearly indestructible. Decades before their deaths, the patients all received grafts of dura mater, a thick membrane that protects the spinal cord, taken from cadavers in order to treat a severe head injury or to repair the covering after surgery....

The supercomputers, named Dogwood and Cactus after the native plants in their respective locations, are Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Cray supercomputers. “These numerical models that we run on these supercomputers, they actually provide the foundation for the forecasts that our various stakeholders here—from the public, water managers, emergency managers in the case of hurricanes for example—use,” says Brian Gross, director of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center. “And there is a direct connection between computing capability and our modeling capability....