Seems Snakes on a Plane isn’t as a ridiculous film as we thought, as new research suggests snakes have been hitchhiking on planes. Feel good about that trip you’re about to take? 

A team of scientists led by the University of Queensland has found that the brown tree snake, which has been obliterating Guam’s native bird population, made it to the Pacific island by hitchhiking on planes. 

And from Guam, they’re hitching it to Hawaii.

SEE ALSO: Nightmare two-headed snake found in Virginia just in time for Halloween season

What planes? Don’t worry, the snakes didn’t just slither through security to a business class seat on a commercial flight. According to the study published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, they hopped on military transport planes somewhere around Australia during World War II.

“The snake hitchhiked on troop carriers from the Australian region and has since driven multiple native bird species into extinction, with only three species now found on the island,” said Associate Professor Bryan Fry from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences in a statement.

Fry told Mashable the snakes “can enter the plane either by slithering up the landing gear or being transported inside of cargo that they have crawled into. Once inside they are protected from the elements.” 

But it’s not just the Australia region that’s accidentally picked up hitchhiking snakes — the U.S. apparently does it too, unwittingly bringing stowaways from Guam to Hawaii. 

“The United States government is still flying military planes from Guam to Hawaii and the snakes continue to hitchhike,” Fry said in a statement.

That’s right, Hawaii.

“They’re regularly intercepted in the Hawaii airports, so if these direct flights are allowed to continue, it’s only a matter of time until they get to Hawaii and wipe out the birds like they did on Guam.”

The problem with hitchhiking snakes

Brown tree snakes are an incredibly large problem on Guam, with an estimated 2 million of the reptiles making themselves at home on an island that’s 50 kilometres (31 miles) long and 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) wide.

According to the Australian Reptile Park, the brown tree snake is one of the only reptile species in the world that has become an introduced pest. And it’s because of this introduction that the devastation has been so effective, as Guam’s bird population had evolved without snakes to worry about — they really didn’t stand a chance.

“For the last 80 years or so, for the brown tree snake at least, this biological advantage has been aided by the introduction of air travel,” Fry said.

The U.S. government, for one, has spent millions to try and eradicate the snake problem. In 2015, the U.S. Air Force dropped two thousand dead mice filled with painkillers on Guam by parachute as part of an $8 million program to kill the snakes.

UQ PhD students Daniel Dashevsky and Jordan Debono, alongside researchers from Florida State University, have been investigating just why brown tree snakes were so effectively pulverising the native bird population on Guam.

They were particularly looking at the brown tree snake’s toxin, which is rather venomous to birds — 100 times more toxic than it is to mammals (and humans aren’t super affected by it.)

But it’s not just the brown tree snake that has this effective invasive effect on birds, Dashevsky and Debono found, it’s cat-eyed snakes belonging to the genus Boiga, which evolved in Africa and spread across the Indian subcontinent, throughout South-East Asia and to Australia.

“[The brown tree snake] contains a toxin that’s made up of two smaller toxins joined together, a feature that was believed to be unique to brown tree snakes. Daniel and Jordan’s research has revealed that this is not the case and that any cat-eyed snakes belonging to the genus Boiga would have caused similar devastation,” Fry said.

“It’s just that this particular species was transported to Guam by accident.”

So, the snakes’ hitchhiking ruse is up, and researchers can start managing its impact on the island’s native bird population.

Just how do you stop a snake from hitchhiking? 

Preventing snakes from sneaking their way into planes is not an easy task.

“The number one effective strategy would be to stop the flights from Guam to Hawaii. Quarantine Hawaii from it entirely. However, both islands are strategically important and therefore this is not likely to happen,” Fry told Mashable.

“Detection with dogs has intercepted snakes but the reality is that since flights are allowed to continue, it is really only a question of when, not if, they reach Hawaii. Eradication has proven to be impossible in Guam, with all efforts failing. So it is not an optimistic scenario for Hawaii.”

Not looking good, birds.

The first trailer for X-Men: Dark Phoenix just debuted on The Late Late Show with James Corden on Wednesday night, and it’s very, very bleak.

The new film takes place in 1992, where the X-Men are no longer outcasts but regarded as national heroes who go on riskier missions. 

The team head to outer space, where they’re hit with a solar flare that unleashes an unrelenting, power-mad force within Jean Grey — who is played by Sophie Turner.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is set to be released on Feb. 14, 2019.

So, you’ve restricted the information advertisers can see on your Facebook profile, but you’re still getting served near-perfect ads? It could be down to your shadow profile.

At some stage you might’ve given your phone number to Facebook for two-factor authentication, or a friend may have given your email away in the contact importer, in an attempt to find friends on the platform.

Those phone numbers or emails might not be visible on one’s profile, but they sit in a hidden layer which is called a shadow profile.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Pages can now join Facebook Groups

Advertisers are able to use this hidden layer of personal information to target you with ads, as outlined in a Gizmodo report. 

All advertisers need to do is upload the phone numbers and email addresses they’ve collected to Facebook. Most of us don’t think about giving these details away when you’re purchasing something from an online store, or say, signing up to a political campaign. 

Facebook calls this a custom audience, and allows advertisers to sell to people they know are already interested in their product or service.

What’s unsettling is that advertisers can seemingly target people who have supplied their phone number to Facebook, thinking it would only be used for security reasons, or have no knowledge of their contact details being given away at all.

A study cited by the report saw researchers from Northwestern University test if Facebook was using shadow contact info by uploading hundreds of landline phone numbers from the college. 

A landline number is information that is unlikely to be added to one’s profile, but likely would’ve sat dormant in one’s personal contacts, only to be uploaded to Facebook by users looking for friends.

The study found many of these numbers could be used for ad targeting, culminating in an ad showing up in the news feed of one of the researchers on the paper, Alan Mislove.

Facebook didn’t reject the study’s findings, with a spokesperson telling Gizmodo: “We outline the information we receive and use for ads in our data policy, and give people control over their ads experience including custom audiences, via their ad preferences.”

What the report reveals is that Facebook is perhaps not transparent enough when it comes to handling data that isn’t publicly available on your profile, culminating in near-psychic advertising, and creepily on point suggestions for people you may know.

Mashable has contacted Facebook for further comment.

Poor ’90s tweens! They never used Facebook Messenger. They couldn’t text people from their iPhones, they couldn’t add GIFs to their WhatsApp messages, and they were far too young for any Twitter DMs. 

Somehow, they survived. And a lucky few of them even had access to one of the most sophisticated pieces of messaging technology to come out of the mid-’90s: The Casio Secret Sender JD-6000.

This tiny purple toy, marketed to tween girls, is the messaging app’s true digital ancestor.

SEE ALSO: Mom’s poster asking to ‘borrow an orange cat’ isn’t as weird as it sounds

If you’re an Xennial like me, you might remember  Casio My Magic Diary, an “electronic organizer” that premiered in 1993. At the time of its release, the Magic Diary was the height of technology. It had software that could store phone numbers and addresses, report local times from across the world, function as a calculator, record friends’ birthdays, log diary entries, give users their horoscopes, and even allow them to “design” digital faces — ideally of their crushes ❤ ❤ <3.

Take a look at the original commercial, which I could only find in Spanish:

Here’s how the Washington Post described the gadget at the time: “Once girls even sent each other notes on scraps of paper, and were then sent off to the principal’s office for doing it. No more … Childhood has gone digital.”

We’ve seen ledes like this dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. But there was actual truth to it back in the early ’90s. This was long before Blackberry became so popular. A wicked cool teen girl who owned a Casio My Magic Diary probably had access to more sophisticated technology than her parents did.

Just one year later, Casio introduced the Casio Secret Sender JD-6000,  shaking up the whole electronic diary world. Using Infrared technology, Secret Sender gave users the opportunity to send each other text messages from across the room. The messages couldn’t travel farther than 25 feet and couldn’t be longer than four lines, each 16 characters long. 

Users could choose from either a pre-written message “Meet you at [ ]” one read, or they could compose an original message.

You could even turn the television on and off by using the same infrared technology. 

The Casio Secret Sender JD-6000 was the vanguard of the digital diary community. You could tell how advanced it was by its string of futuristic numbers (six thousand!) and the random letters in its brand name. Remember, this is the pre-Live Journal era. Kaybee Casio products were all my generation had.

“Kid communication has come a long way from two cans and a string,” New York Magazine wrote at the time.

The Sender and its subsequent iteration, the Super Magic Diary, also had its competitors, though they’re long since forgotten. There was Zender from Electronic Arts, which retailed for $47 and had a similar messaging function with an even wider range of 500 feet. Tiger Electronics had a product called Super Data Blasters, which had similar messaging technology and a uniquely horrific name (who but total nerds would think the term “Data Blasters” was cool?”).

Just look at the uh, relative sophistication of the Super Magic Diary ad: 

Now compare it to Super Data Blasters:

Even though Casio Secret Sender initially retailed for $119, it had what its competitors lacked: excellent branding. It had the word “secret” in the title! It had a modern (i.e., not entirely pink) palette, which catered well to the feminist-lite delia*s demographic.

And let’s be honest: The Casio Secret Sender never reached a saturation in which multiple people could text. That $119.95 went way beyond what most Xennial tweens held in their smiley-face coin purses. If you had one, you were lucky; if you met someone else who also did — and who wanted to text you back — you were the exception. This was pen pal culture taken to the max.

How many tweens at the time even had friends?

What made the Secret Sender powerful was its promise: an entire digital universe, contained privately in your sweaty, hormonal hands. When you’re a teen girl, privacy matters more than anything (I can’t tell you the number of times tween me shouted at my parents to “Leave me alone!” even though I was just … isolated in my room, eating Cheez-Its and watching Cheers reruns). Everything feels so exposed at that age: your gross, pubescent body, your secret crushes, your dumbest, most vulnerable feelings.

The idea that you could message anyone you wanted, whenever you wanted to, without anyone looking, was revolutionary. There was no paper trail. The Casio Secret Sender belonged to you and you alone.

Alas, the Sender slowly petered out, never quite getting the respect it deserved. Cell phones and PDAs picked up the credit for messaging technology. The poor JD-6000 was left to the dustbin of history and Reddit nostalgia pages.

Apparently, people wanted to text people from more than 25 feet away. Nerds.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Casio Secret Sender has been forgotten. Look at Snapchat. Technology created for teens never quite gets the credit it’s owed until it’s discovered and claimed by adults. Lil’ ol’ Secret Sender just couldn’t compete when it came to the older demographic.

But let’s all pay the Casio Secret Sender JD-6000 some respect for incorporating personal messaging technology before most of us knew what that was. 

Janky ’90s tween toys deserve so much more than what we’ve given them.