Bats are social animals, developing friendships and raising their young village-style. They also need to communicate like fighter pilots--quickly, specifically and in brief form--so they don't collide when they're hunting prey. And they need a way to relocate their social groups in the dark. The combination of these attributes led scientists to wonder whether bats, like humans, can recognize close social contacts based on the sounds of their voices.

Hanna Kastein from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany, and her colleagues set out to study the the false Vampire bat, Megaderma lyra, and noticed that they perform little individualized "body contacts"--like pals tapping each other on the shoulder. The researchers wanted to see if these bats also recognized each other by voice, and whether this helps them find each other at night.

They took two groups of bats and put them in two separate "flight rooms" for two months. The scientists noted which bats were in frequent contact, and then separated them for up to four hours to see if they'd call each other. They recorded the bats' name-calling, and then played these recordings to three sets of other, isolated bats: Known body-contact friends, non-body contact friends, and unknown bats from another group. Here's an example call:

Kastein and colleagues found all the isolated bats turned toward the loudspeakers, apparently yearning for bat companionship. Then the team did a habituation exercise, in which they played repeated calls from one bat, until the test-subject bats started to ignore it. After that, they played a different set of calls. Bats were more likely to respond to a call from an existing friend-bat--a member of their own social group--than a new call from that original, habituation-bat, the researchers found.

This is important, because it suggests the bats noticed something about the sound of the calls that is apparently unique to individuals. They could discriminate among new bats, old bats and new sounds made by old bats.

"Bats are the first mammals for which this close functional relationship between stimulus structure and discrimination behavior has been established. Such a relationship may be relevant for mammals in general," the researchers write.

Last year, some other German researchers studied bat echolocation calls--which humans can't hear--and found these, too, contain detailed information about individuals. This vocal signature helps male bats avoid rivals and helps females find their partners, for instance. For bats as well as people, the ability to find your friends in a clamorous crowd can be useful.

The new research appears in the journal Animal Cognition.

The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to anchor the Navy of the future. Instead, a report obtained by Bloomberg News reveals a program plagued by problems, high costs, and an inability to meet even simple docking requirements.

Ideally, the Littoral Combat Ship is one vessel that can transform to fulfill one of three roles at a time: anti-mine, anti-submarine, or ocean surface combat. To do this, it uses interchangeable modules, helicopters, unmanned underwater vehicles (sea drones!), and missiles, depending on the mission. In theory, the modules work like LEGOs, swapping out a sonar array from the anti-submarine kit for a 30mm gun in the surface warfare kit.

In practice, the modules don't work. The goal was for a 96-hour turnaround between modules in place and specific other tools needed (the above-mentioned helicopters, etc). A ship that adaptable and flexible could respond rapidly to a crisis. But the report obtained by Bloomberg reveals that while a 96-hour module exchange is technically possible, it requires a nearby dock, with all the components for the next module already on hand. That takes a lot of advance planning to set up and requires fetching spare modules from naval bases beforehand (a process that took weeks in a training exercise.)

The Littoral Combat Ship is also a far cry from durable. A more recent report says the ship is not expected to remain capable after taking a hit from an opponent, which is a significant problem for a naval vessel. Granted, it is not designed to carry on a full naval battle by itself, but it doesn't take an enemy warship to sink it. Instead, this $440 million ship can be knocked out of a fight by a single hostile cruise missile.

Department of Defense acquisition programs are laughably infamous for running over budget. Usually, however, a flagship program still ends in a useful vehicle, even if it cost billions more than expected. The Pentagon's Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program, for example, had a similarly high total price tag of $45 billion. While value-for-cost of the MRAP program is still in question, it did at least deliver a durable vehicle to troops fighting abroad.

It is still possible that the Littoral Combat Ship can drastically improve; while the year-old report mentions critical flaws, they are not wholly insurmountable. Fixing them will take more time and more monetary investment, and in the age of sequestration, both resources are increasingly scarce.

[Bloomberg]

That widowed Ukrainian engineer you just met on your favorite dating website? She's probably a scammer.

Scam dating profiles are more likely to say they are Catholic; from Nigeria, the Ukraine or the Philippines; widowed and have a doctoral degree-among other characteristics, according to new data compiled by the dating website SeekingArrangement.com. Romance scammers tug at the heartstrings or stroke the ego to get dating site users to send them money.

SeekingArrangement caters to a very specific type of relationship, but the lessons here should apply to other dating sites and even to other aspects of digital life, Leroy Velasquez, a SeekingArrangement spokesman, tells Popular Science. "Because of the fact that we do cater to wealthy demographic, we do get an influx of scammers," he says. But scammers act the same everywhere. "Your random spam email? It's a really crappy version of what a man or woman would get on a dating profile," he says.

SeekingArrangement got its latest stats from screening new profiles over 10 months. The profiles first go through automated screening software, which flags both traits in the profile, such as certain ethnicities, and things that aren't visible in the profile, such as certain IP addresses and even certain passwords that scammers seem to like more than other people. Then a person on staff looks through the flagged profiles and decides whom to ban, Velasquez says.

SeekingArrangement has banned 60,000 profiles in the last 10 months, or about 220 a day. Here's what they've found are the ingredients in the typical scam profile.

Lovin' God
Scammers are mostly Catholic, or at least they say they are. Eighty-two percent of banned SeekingArrangement profiles say they're Catholic and religion was the most common trait among fraudulent accounts. Scammer talk a lot about spirituality in the messages they send, too. Velasquez thinks this helps them seem more moral and trustworthy.

Password preferences
Or maybe they really do identify as religious? Scammers are more likely than honest profiles to have passwords like "godisgood" or "lovinggod."

Look out for ladies
Seventy-one percent of scam profiles say they're female. (This may be specific to SeekingArrangement, where most of the wealthy "sugar daddy" users are straight men. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says the most common romance scam target is a woman over 40.)

Black widows
Sixty-three percent of scam profiles say they're widowers. "These men and women tug on your heartstrings," Velasquez says.

Doctoral delusion
Thirty-seven percent of scam profiles say they have a graduate degree and 54 percent say they have doctorates.

SeekingArrangement has never found a fraudulent profile in which the person said he or she had a high school diploma and no bachelor's degree, Velasquez says.

Certain races
Although American Indians make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, 36 percent of scam profiles say they're Native. Other popular races are mixed (19 percent) and other (17 percent). "They try to be a different race, something other than the usual, because it sounds more exotic," Velasquez says.

As a member of a race that's also exoticized… eww.

Certain places
Just like spam in your email inbox, scam profiles most commonly come from Nigeria (28 percent). Other common countries of origin are the Ukraine (23 percent) and the Philippines (21 percent). Although these countries are well known for scams, scammers nevertheless will be honest in their profile about where they're located because automated screening software looks for discrepancies between stated locations and where people actually sign onto the site.

Shifty jobs
Twenty-six percent of scammers say they're engineers, 25 percent say they're royalty and 23 percent say they're self-employed. Saying they're self-employed makes them more difficult to fact-check by searching a corporate website, Velasquez says. And royalty have money they can send you, if you only give them your bank account information, while engineers may seem smart and thus trustworthy, Velasquez says.

A new FBI proposal would compel internet communications companies to hand over information--or pay a fine.

Existing wiretap law is almost 20 years old and doesn't capture the nuances of modern internet use. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was first authorized in 1994, and it ordered "telecommunications carriers" to comply with court orders to assist in intercepting communication. Since then, communication online has taken off, while the landscape of what we know has telecommunications carriers has drastically changed. In 2006, the FCC expanded the act to include Internet access providers, but there's a tricky caveat: court orders under existing law only instruct internet communications providers to offer technical assistance to law enforcement. That gives the tech companies some leeway if they're uncomfortable handing over information; they can just say they were unable to make the technology work the way the FBI wants.

Under the new proposal, that wiggle room disappears. FBI officials can notify a company (with a wiretap order, say) that they need the tech to be surveillance-ready in 30 days. If not? Fines, starting at $25,000/day that the capability isn't there. Of course, complying isn't exactly free, either. Over at Lawfare, Susan Landau writes:

The plan allows the FBI to adapt quickly as new media emerge, and more and more private information is in the hands of internet-based tech companies. But it's still a far cry from law. Right now, the Obama administration is considering the proposal. If White House officials choose to push it forward, it would still need to pass in Congress.

The late Carl Sagan said it best on his TV show Cosmos: "We're made of star-stuff." He meant that atoms which make up our bodies-and everything around us-formed when giant stars blew up billions of years ago. That material shot across space, clumped into the solar system, and led to life on Earth.

Now a group of German scientists have gone meta on Sagan. In cores of sediment drilled from the Pacific Ocean bottom, the researchers found traces of iron-60. It's a heavier isotope of iron forged only by supernovas and mostly vanishes in a couple dozen million years. What's more, they found the iron-60 inside 2.2-million-year-old bacteria organs called magnetosomes, which the microbes use to sense the Earth's magnetic field.

The half-life of iron-60 is 2.62 million years. Iron-54, by contrast, is the most abundant form of iron on Earth and hardly decays at all. (Which is why it still exists today.)

The magnetosomes with iron-60 came from a 2.2-million-year-old layer of sediment. The only reasonable explanation, which Technische Universität München announced in a press release today, is that a nearby supernova splattered Earth with its iron-rich dust, the material sank to the ocean bottom, and bacteria ate it.

The Fe-60 wasn't easy to find. Less than one quadrillionth (0.0000000000001 percent) of the iron in the bacteria organs was made up of the supernova dust. To detect it, the German scientists had to use an accelerator mass spectrometer.

Now that they've proven the method, the researchers plan to look in other sediment cores for life-based traces of nearby supernova explosions across time.

[Via Technische Universität München and APS.org]

California State Senator Leland Yee (who represents the western part of San Francisco) announced that he will pursue outlawing 3-D-printed weaponry, in the wake of the first 3-D-printed gun to be successfully fired.

This weekend, a Texas group called Defense Distributed created the plans for a 3-D-printed gun made almost entirely of plastic--the only metal part is a very small firing pin. (For more on that, check out this article.) Federal law restricts the purchase of guns--barely--but places no restrictions on the creation of weaponry.

That hasn't been much of a problem in the past; while it's certainly possible to use various metalworking machines to create a working firearm, it's expensive and difficult, requiring quite a bit of expertise, and when it's easy and cheap to buy a professionally made gun (legally or illegally), homemade guns haven't caught on.

But 3-D printers are a bit different. They're rapidly decreasing in price; the machinery needed to craft a metal gun would cost tens of thousands of dollars, while you can buy a 3-D printer online for a thousand dollars or so. The price, too, will only drop from there; companies like Makerbot and Solidoodle are dedicated to pushing that price as far south as possible, down past the $500 mark. Those printers aren't capable of printing a gun yet--but they will be.

The other major advantage is ease. It takes considerable skill to craft a metal gun, and none at all to download a CAD file and press "print." In fact, this particular file has been downloaded over 100,000 times already, according to Forbes.

It's unclear how Yee's bill would actually ban this technology; it's virtually impossible to stop digital files from distributing, as any member of the Record Industry Association of America could tell you. A spokesman said the bill was being drafted at the moment, so the details are still being hammered out. Perhaps a blanket federal law against creating one's own firearms would be in order?

[via the Telegraph]

John McGinnis thinks ordinary families would rather skip the airport and fly themselves. So he is trying to reinvent the personal airplane with the help of his father, son, and a rotating crew of about two dozen volunteers. Unlike small aircraft today-which can cost more than a house-McGinnis says Synergy could be cheaper, quieter, and, at more than 40 mpg, three times as fuel-efficient.

McGinnis, a 47-year-old composite manufacturer, flew his first airplane in second grade. Perplexed by the inefficiencies of personal aircraft, he taught himself aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics over two decades. One day, while perusing scientific studies at a desk in his daughters' bedroom, he read a NASA researcher's paper challenging a classic aerodynamic drag equation. McGinnis could see the possibilities. "I came out of the girls' bedroom ranting like a madman to my wife," he says. " ‘Honey, you're never going to believe this. I think I just solved a problem I've been working on since I was a little kid.'"

Synergy's wings bend upward and into a box shape for minimum drag and maximum efficiency. The top half of each wing swoops behind the body to function as a tail while providing greater in-flight stability. The double-box tail design also makes gliding easier by counteracting tornado-like vortices at the wings' tips. And instead of a front-mounted propeller, an impeller placed behind the bullet-shaped body quiets noise while adding thrust.

1) A 200hp turbodiesel engine expels heat below the impeller, adding thrust.
2) Large wings allow slower takeoffs and landings.
3) Box tails create airflow patterns that reduce drag and increase flight stability.
4) An autopilot computer can land Synergy at a nearby runway during an emergency; a ballistic parachute can also be deployed.

McGinnis works on Synergy in his father's garage, where he uses CNC machines and custom molds to fabricate components and 3-D software to rapidly model new ideas. Family members serve among the core build crew, with McGinnis's son, Kyle, second-in-command. A quarter-scale prototype made from fiberglass, carbon fiber, and Kevlar suggests that both the team's manufacturing process and unusual wing configuration work. Using about $80,000 in crowdfunded cash, they hope to finish a full-scale, five-person aircraft this year. "I work on it 90 hours a week, with a few hours of sleep," McGinnis says. "What drives me to do it is that no one else will."

INVENTOR
John McGinnis

COMPANY
Synergy Aircraft

INVENTION
Synergy

COST TO DEVELOP
Undisclosed

MATURITY
2/10

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 Invention Awards section here, and see all of our May issue here.

Fifty years ago this week, Italian mechanic and tractor maker Ferruccio Lamborghini founded a car company in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy. In the decades since, Lamborghinis have appeared often in the pages of Popular Science-we've geeked out over their innovative designs, eye-watering speeds, and safety innovations.

Above is the Lamborghini LP 500, from the June 1971 issue of Popular Science. We called the prototype "backward" because the engine was mounted ahead of the rear axle, facing back: "The design eats up a lot of space, but puts 53 percent of the weight on the rear wheels for exceptional balance and handling." The tilt-up doors were the finishing touch on what was, at the time, the ultimate car of the future.

"If it's super speed you want, go to Italy," said Popular Science car editor Jan P. Norbye in May 1971. The Lamborghini Miura above had a top speed of 180 mph and was then the fastest road car available in the world. The secret to its speed? "Maximum rigidity and minimum weight in bodies and frames," Norbye wrote. The Miura's engine, clutch, and transaxle together weighed only 700 pounds.

From 1968, this two-door, 325-horsepower Lamborghini Espada had a nearly flat roof that blended into a horizontal rear "window." So the driver could actually see out the back of the car, Lamborghini added a strip of glass protected by a grille in the squared-off tail. With a top speed of 165 mph, this four-seater car had "plenty of zip," we wrote in December 1968.

Lamborghini's 200-mph, 485-horsepower Diablo was "a beast," wrote Popular Science editor Dan McCosh in May 1990. The two-seater car had a 0 to 60 acceleration time of 4 seconds and weighed 3,640 pounds.

To celebrate its golden anniversary this week, Lamborghini is sending hundreds of its cars (including its very first model, the 1963 350 GT) on a 750 tour from Milan to Sant'Agata. Let us know if you need drivers!

I'm a mechanical engineer who loves bicycling. When gas prices soared through the roof in 2009, I rode my bike to save money. I wanted to charge USB devices, such as my phone, during commutes but didn't want to spend $150 (or more) on a commercial wheel-hub generator. In the end, I was able to build a cheaper system.

Electrical work wasn't my expertise, so I had to teach myself how to build circuits from the ground up. I'm now on version three of my two-port USB generator, which is about 70 percent efficient above 12 mph and creates less drag on bike wheels than other designs. With the right equipment, you can build one yourself.

STEPPER MOTOR

A stepper motor converts the rear wheel's spinning motion into electricity. To keep the flow consistent enough to charge devices, get a five-volt, 3.3-amp model (about $10 at electronics surplus stores). Attach a small wheel-I cut one from plywood-to the stepper motor. Line the small wheel's rim with foam padding and electrical tape to give it grip. When mounted against the bike's rear rim, the small wheel will turn the motor.

RECTIFIER

USB devices use direct current, but stepping motors provide alternating current. Convert the flow by building a rectifier out of eight 1N4001 diodes ($1 a pair at hobby stores). Link the diodes in anode-to-cathode pairs, and solder them together to make four pairs. Solder two pairs side by side into a bridge, and repeat with the other pairs for a total of two bridges. Connect each bridge's midpoints with four-conductor wire to the stepper motor's positive and negative wires [see wiring diagram above].

USB CAR CHARGER

Open a two-port USB car charger. Remove the spring on the cylindrical end (positive lead) and the two clips (negative lead) that normally secure the charger in a power port. Solder the rectifier's positive and negative leads to corresponding terminals on the charger. Connect the other ends of the wires to the matching terminals on the stepper motor.

GENERATOR FRAME

Build a frame to keep the generator's small wheel in contact with a bike rim. My bike has a rear rack, so I cut a six-inch-long slab of aluminum to span two bars of the rack [see above photo]. I secured the slab under the generator with U-bolts. Next, I cut two 90-degree aluminum angles for the other side of the generator and bolted them to the slab to clamp everything in place. Attach the USB charging port wherever you'd like (I put mine below the seat), and start pedaling for portable power.

Time: 1 day
Cost: $25
Difficulty: 3/5

For Costlow's complete build instructions, download this PDF.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

Take an object that's massive enough, and it will bend light around it in what scientists call a gravitational lens. Want to see one for yourself? Maybe you can. Citizen science website Zooniverse is hosting a project where you can spot gravitational lenses in images collected by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, but never before seen by humans.

Join the project at Spacewarps.org. The site will teach you what to look for. All you have to do is click on galaxies that look like they're being lensed by nearby neighbors.

Finding gravitational lenses is helpful to professional astronomers because the lenses magnify galaxies that sit immediately behind them, acting like cosmic telescopes so astronomers can better observe the lensed galaxies. The light distortions that happen in lensing can also tell astronomers about how much mass is in the lensed object and how that matter is arranged.

Gravitational lensing is rare. Astronomers now know of only about 400 such objects. Yet they think modern telescopes, with human help, should be able to detect thousands more.

Space Warps participants are now classifying about 1,000 images a minute, according to a tweet from the site.

[Space Warps]

You'd think moon dust would be something people would keep an eye on since, you know, you have to go to the freaking moon to get it. But somehow, samples retrieved from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission got lost--probably for years--in a University of California, Berkeley, archive until they were found again last month.

Archivist Karen Nelson found 20 vials of the stuff, labeled "24 July 1970," while clearing out a Berkeley warehouse last month. (Hard not to imagine the warehouse that shows up at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Along with the samples was a 1971 paper that examined the samples for carbon. It's not clear exactly how long they were stuck in storage, but the samples--sent to 150 U.S. labs after the moon mission--should've been returned to NASA after testing.

Nelson, in a media release, said she contacted Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory: "They were surprised we had the samples," she said. Which, yeah, you'd assume they would be. Afterward, Nelson got in touch with NASA, which allowed her to open the vacuum-sealed container the vials were in but requested the moon dust back.

Apparently you can't just shout "Finders, keepers!" when you come across this kind of thing.

Android tablets are mostly dull; Asus, Samsung, Sony, and the rest are typically just pumping out versions of the same platform. Earl, from a startup called Sqigle (sic), is quite a bit different: it's designed top to bottom for use in the wild.

To that end, it starts off with an electrophoretic display, an exceedingly low-power technology that's used in the black-and-white ebook readers like the Kindle and Nook. A tablet's screen drains the most battery, by far, so using a low-power screen like this is a great way to extend the battery life. Of course, that means you also get extremely low refresh rates and no color, so you can pretty much forget about watching video on this thing, but as a wilderness guide? That's not nearly as important as battery life.

Touchscreens also work differently with electrophoretic displays; a regular LCD touchscreen uses capacitive technology, which senses the minute electrical charge your finger gives off. Touchscreen electrophoretic displays use infrared sensors, so any contact that breaks the infrared beam triggers a reaction. It's less precise, but it means you can use gloves.

Then it's got an unusual array of sensors, from internal weather sensors (barometer, humidity sensor, thermometer) to FRS, GMRS and MURS radio receivers to talk over long distances to a regular AM/FM radio. It's also "extremified," capable of withstanding dusting, water, and both high and low temperatures. And it's got a solar panel on the back, which typically would be an inefficient way to charge such a power-hungry gadget as a tablet--there's a reason tablets don't all have solar panels on them--but for a lower-power device, it could actually provide enough power. (The company says it'll charge the 3,000mAh battery in five hours, which sounds a little dubious to me.)

I've never tried Android on an electrophoretic device before; those touchscreens tend to be finicky and imprecise, so I'd imagine it could be difficult to use an operating system designed for a different screen technology. But less-complex selection should be fine.

The project is currently being crowdfunded, but in an unusual way; they're not going through Kickstarter or Indiegogo, instead choosing a sort of provisional pre-order strategy. You plunk down $250, and if the project gets funded, you get a tablet. If not, you get refunded. Tyson Fok, the director of strategic programs for the Earl project, tells me that this decision came from a desire for more intricate page designs, which sounds insane to me--the Earl page is not that complicated, Kickstarter's pages look nice, and also who cares--and, more sensibly, that Kickstarter takes a cut of the funding. But I'd be very suspicious to plop down $250 for a startup; the assurance that you won't get screwed is part of the ostensible goal of Kickstarter.

Anyway, check out the project here; funding will go until June 9th, if you're interested.

More than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, crude oil continued to sicken Gulf Coast fish, according to a new study. Gulf killifish, which are considered sentinel species that can indicate broader environmental problems, suffered heart defects, delayed hatching and other problems.

Lead author Benjamin Dubansky of Louisiana State University and his colleagues sailed into the Gulf of Mexico four times between May 2010, just after the spill, and August 2011, collecting fish samples. Killifish are abundant and don't migrate, so they are good subjects for studying the oil's impact. The expeditions' time frame coincided with two peak spawning periods for the killifish, according to Dubansky's paper. The scientists took samples from several un-oiled sites and a sixth site at Grand Terre Island, La., which was directly impacted by oil.

The team monitored the fish to measure how the oil affected them, and they also took some oil from this area back to the lab, where they exposed killifish embryos to it to see what would happen. They found evidence that the fishes' livers and gills were affected, which indicates damage as the fish tried to breathe in the contaminated water and as their livers tried to metabolize the oil. Fewer fish hatched than would be expected, and among fish that did hatch, the creatures were smaller and experienced swelling around their hearts and in their yolk sacs.

"These data include results that encompass two breeding seasons, and indicate that contaminating oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill impacts organismal fitness, which may translate into longer-term effects at the population level for Gulf killifish and other biota that live or spawn in similar habitats," the authors write.

But co-author Andrew Whitehead, an assistant professor of environmental toxicology at University of California-Davis, notes that not all killifish habitats were affected. Oil showed up in patches rather than coating the entire Gulf Coast, so some fish probably came away unscathed. He added that some of the healthier killifish could serve as a buffer for the species as a whole.

The paper was posted online before publication in Environmental Science and Technology.

[via Futurity]

The infamous "Mystery Monkey of Tampa," an escaped rhesus macaque, was captured back in October. The rhesus macaque is not a rare monkey; it's adapted to human society better than most, can survive on all kinds of foods, and can live in most any kind of hot-weather environment.

And yet the Mystery Monkey captured the nation's attention. A monkey! On the loose! In Florida! So cool! And it got us wondering: why aren't there monkeys all over the United States? We've got tropical zones in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, hot grasslands in the deep south, humid swamps in Louisiana and South Florida. And there are cold-weather monkeys too, for instance in northern Japan and the Himalayas. What's the deal? Why don't we have any wild monkeys here?

I spoke to Dr. John Flynn, a paleontologist and expert on mammalian evolution at the American Museum of Natural History, to find out why the US is stuck with lame squirrels and pigeons and stuff rather than cool monkeys. "In terms of modern primates, that's a true observation," he said. "But 50 million years ago, there were primates here." It turns out there are lots of reasons why the ancient primates that inhabited what is now the United States--and even Canada!--no longer call those areas home.

Primates came to the New World (meaning North and South America) from, we think, Africa. As improbable as it sounds, scientists think early primates crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed on the shores of both continents tens of millions of years ago, probably on some kind of vegetation raft. That's how most plants and animals get to isolated islands--which the Americas were, at the time. Fossils have been recovered of early primates in Texas a whopping 43 million years ago, the oldest primate fossil ever found in North America. But the continents looked very different then, compared to now; most importantly, North and South America were completely different islands. The Isthmus of Panama, which we now refer to as Central America, didn't appear until much later, by which time the climate on both Americas was very different from when the primates first landed there.

When they did first land here, the climate was much warmer than it is now, and the primates evolved and diversified to take advantage of that.

During the Eocene, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago, the planet warmed to an incredible degree. We've found evidence of palm trees in Alaska from that era. The entire planet, besides the very tips of the Arctic and Antarctic, was probably covered in rainforests, much of it tropical. For a monkey coming over from Africa, North America would have looked just great. Early primates thrived on both continents, with no contact between them. In North America, there were two main families of these primates: the omomyids and the adapids. There's some variation in size, behavior and diet, but in general, these were small, tarsier-like creatures with grasping hands and claws, large eyes, and bodies adapted to eat fruits, leaves, and insects. There's a lot of debate about the modern-day relatives to these primates; some think they're strepsirrhines, the family including lemurs, lorises, and bushbabies, but others think they're basal relatives of the tarsiers (which are primates, but not closely related to other monkeys).

Then the planet began to cool, and cool quickly. Forests died out. The poles covered with ice. Many of the flora and fauna that had populated the planet during the Eocene just couldn't survive in the new, colder world. This event is called the Grande Coupure--occurring about 33.9 million years ago, it was a mass extinction of animals, in which most of the world's creatures (aside from a precious few, like the Virginia opossum and the dormouse) were unable to adapt to the new climate and perished. It hit the primate family especially hard. In the New World, the primate population shrunk significantly. Any primate living in, say, the Great Lakes region simply went extinct, unable to cope with the new Wisconsin winters.

In South America, the primates contracted to the region around the equator. But even the hottest, southernmost parts of North America--then still detached from South America--were too chilly or otherwise inhospitable for the North American Primates. The few places where they maybe could have survived, like the Florida Keys and the islands of the Caribbean, were inaccessible. Sure, monkeys could have survived in Aruba, if they had arrived at just the right time. But the chances of getting there on some kind of float, the way primates had come over from Africa so many millions of years before, were slim, and the Earth was cooling rapidly. There are some primate fossils from the Caribbean; "Some monkeys have gotten to some of the Caribbean islands and gone extinct," says Dr. Flynn. Another collection of random events and they might have survived, but not this time.

The specific type of primate that survived is called the Platyrrhines. "The Platyrrhines, or New World monkeys," says Dr. Flynn, "are all arboreal. They live in tropical forests; they're specialized for that kind of habitat." So the monkeys we now know, which live in the warmer and more forested parts of South and Central America, are all the survivors of the cooling planet. They lucked out and ended up in the one section of the New World that could suit them. And there they stayed, adapting and evolving. Then, 3 million years ago, the Isthmus of Panama formed, connecting North and South America and separating the Atlantic from the Pacific Oceans. That's not that long ago, in geographic terms. A few species--Dr. Flynn specifically named the various species of spider monkey--were hardy enough to move north along the isthmus and survive as far north as southern Mexico. North of that was desert. Too dry and too sparsely forested for a New World monkey to traverse.

Why haven't they moved further north? Well, the Platyrrhines are not especially adaptable animals. Unlike the macaque and other Old World monkeys--or even non-primates, like the raccoon or fox--they need trees, they need heat, and they need moisture. Push them too far north and they simply won't survive. There's a distinct climate zone division in southern Mexico--no Mexican monkey can make it on the northern side.

Primates are often intelligent, but that doesn't translate into adaptability. Think of the mountain gorilla, restricted to a few populations in forested central Africa, unable to live anywhere else. Adaptability is often a sign of intelligence, but intelligence in a species is no guarantee of adaptability.

The recurring answer to the question of why there are no monkeys in the US is "how would they get here?" Other animals, and probably humans, passed over the Bering Land Bridge from Russian into Alaska, but the Bering Land Bridge appeared only 20,000 years ago--long after the planet had cooled to when that latitude would be deathly cold for a monkey. "The only way you could get to North America would be polar routes or through water," says Dr. Flynn. "Even the most extreme monkeys don't get to the super high latitudes, so the continent was effectively sealed off."

Monkeys can certainly survive in North America. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa is proof enough of that. But for them to survive here, they have to get here--the monkeys that were here, the Platyrrhines, aren't the ones to survive in a place like Tampa. It's actually possible that a Platyrrhine could maybe give it a go in the Caribbean or the Florida Keys, the most tropical environments north of Mexico, but: how would they get there (since those are all islands) and would they be able to survive with as much human settlement as those places have?

Macaques could make it, but it would take someone bringing them here--and that's exactly what happened in the case of the Mystery Monkey, which was part of a troupe of macaques released by some lunatic tour boat operator known as "Colonel Tooey" who thought the macaques would make for a better "Jungle Cruise." (This is a true story. Florida is weird.) Short of a whole bunch of determined crazies, monkeys that would survive in North America don't have the means to get here.

But! What about global warming? Could the scourge of climate change lead to a friendly neighborhood monkey in Brooklyn? "Anything is possible in evolution," says Dr. Flynn. "If climate change continues and it gets warmer globally, they could continue further north." But we'd need continuous forests from southern Mexico on northwards, and "dryness is an issue, though in the future they might get increased rainfall." So, no monkeys in the near future. But if the temperature keeps rising, I'll keep an eye out my window just the same.

Stargazers in parts of Australia will get to witness a dramatic "ring of fire" solar eclipse later today. For anyone else who isn't hanging out down under, SLOOH, a robotic telescope service, will have a livestream of the eclipse here.

An annular solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes in front of the sun but doesn't cover it completely, leaving a bright solar ring around the black Moon. Hence the nickname "ring of fire."

The solar eclipse will be visible to folks in western Australia and some southern islands in the Pacific. About 95 percent of the sun will be covered, so if you are able to see it in real life, remember that it's probably not worth blindness--maybe don't look it directly in the eye.

The last annular eclipse passed over the U.S. almost a year ago. The next one, a hybrid eclipse, will occur in early November.

You're driving around, when you hear a weird rattling noise coming out of your car. Even if you know your way around an engine, you don't know exactly where the problem is coming from, which makes it tough to fix. So, quick: curl into the fetal position and begin taking public transportation for the rest of your days. Or try out this sound camera, which can map exactly where the problem is.

Developed by researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the camera creates a heatmap-like view of machinery (or anything else): 30 digital microphones and a high-res camera pick up on what's making noise, and an image shows the different levels of noise, organized by a color gradient. Blue means a little noise, while red is the most extreme level.

It's not the first sound camera, but at about 4 pounds, it's one of the most portable, the inventors say--just grab onto the handles and point it at the thing you want to hear.

Since the camera still requires you to fix the broken machine after you diagnose it, the device is probably going to be used more by professionals than amateurs. Although it would be nice to hunt down the person chatting in a move theater.

Snapchat, a messaging service which allows users to send photos and videos that self-destruct after a few seconds, has a flaw deep in its DNA. This morning, a 24-year-old named Richard Hickman, of Decipher Forensics, a company specializing in data recovery, found that he could recover some data he wasn't supposed to. "Snaps," as the messages sent via Snapchat are called, stick around, to some degree, when received with Android phones. Coverage of the flaw suggests that sexts will now be spread and teen lives will be ruined. But that overlooks what Snapchat means, and why it's important. And it is, in the way a smartphone app can be important, important.

When Snapchat debuted, and for a good few months after it had begun to catch on, it was dogged with the accusation that it is nothing more than an app for exchanging nudie pics. What use could there be for a photo/video messaging service that deletes the message after a few seconds, if not for sending inappropriate (read: sexual) things? Anyone who's used it, really tried to use it, knows differently, as I'll get into in a sec, but that conception of the service stuck around even as Snapchat took off, which is why local news anchors tonight will express concern about our children's privacy. The privacy element is important, but Snapchat is a response to other issues that get ignored in the wake of easy-to-understand "hacking" scandals--oversaturation, impermanence, and the online presence, to name a few.

This isn't the first time fears of Snapchat's persistence have caused a stir. In late December, BuzzFeed's Katie Notopoulos discovered that some Snapchat videos could be saved outside of the app. There was a particular trick to it; you had to dive deep into your phone's file tree and retrieve the video from a temporary folder before opening it. If you opened--aka viewed--the snap, it was gone. Snapchat says they fixed this bug.

Now, with over 150 million snaps sent every day, Snapchat is a legitimate communication medium. And the hubbub about its "hackability" misses some key points.

Snapchat is about more than sexting. This seemed ludicrous when Evan Spiegel, creator of the app, stated it. "I certainly don't think that the service is used that way typically," he said recently at the All Things D conference. But he's right! I and a group of other tech writers (who shall remain nameless) use the app often. It began semi-ironically, I suppose, wanting to try out a silly faddish app for teens, but we realized pretty quickly that the app actually fills a gap in our communication.

Most of what we do online is permanent, much more permanent than we realize when creating it. A diary entry you wrote on LiveJournal in 2002 is still online, somewhere. Your first tweets are still out there. You can dig up emails, logs of IM chats, photos posted on Flickr, status updates on Facebook. (Or, more recently, a meme-ified instant hero had his image shattered by decades-old arrests.) Our output is quickly covered over by new items, but that doesn't make it go away.

It allows messaging to be ephemeral and experimental.And that's what's so freeing about Snapchat. It allows messaging to be ephemeral and experimental. You don't necessarily want to take an Instagram shot of your weird neighbor or post a Vine of yourself sprinting up and down a rare empty subway car. Those are silly moments, and they don't need to be part of your online portfolio. They're not embarrassing, either, although they can be, and that's okay. The stakes are so much lower with a photo or video that'll only exist for nine seconds; a lousy snap earns a shrug rather than judgment, and a great one is a fantastic surprise. Your future employer will read your tweets, but won't see your snaps.

It sounds ridiculous, but there is something lovely and beautiful and very today about visual art that exists only on a four-inch cellphone screen for a few seconds. Internet culture is overwhelming; there's too much of everything. Snapchat is the one service that you wish there was more of. You wish you could save it. You wish you could keep experiencing it. When was the last time you went to a concert and weren't surrounded by people taking photos and videos on their phones? Non-recorded experience is a hard thing to find in 2013.

It's an ideal service for capturing the world in a more personal, thought-free (but not thoughtless!) way than any other service. And that's helped along by the fact that you don't publish snaps--you send them to individuals, tapping on their names out of a list you create.

Snapchat is not really a great way to sext, because, well, there is no great, or at least secure, way to sext. It's well-known that you can take a screenshot while a snap is on-screen; the only "protection" is that the sender gets a notification that their snap has been screenshotted, which is kind of like getting mugged and then getting a letter in the mail that reads "You've been mugged!!" There's no password on the app itself, either; anyone with access to your phone can view any new snaps. That doesn't forgive what appears to be some sloppy work on the Snapchat developer's side; if the service says it doesn't save snaps, it shouldn't save snaps. There's absolutely a privacy issue at stake which Snapchat should address. But privacy isn't the only thing that's interesting about Snapchat.

Snapchat isn't about cryptographically secure communication. It is, to continue to be laughably earnest and self-serious about an app represented by a bloody-mouthed ghost icon, a restriction that encourages creativity. It's like writing a novel without the letter E. Sure, you could, and many people do, use Snapchat for stupid selfies and pictures of their junk. But even that represents the goal: to make something impermanent in a world where everything is forever.

So if we take the view that Snapchat is not about sending indecent pictures, that its impermanence is aesthetic rather than literal, the fact that it is outrageously difficult to perform this hack is much more reassuring. Hickman himself says it takes six hours to do, and he has no idea how long the snaps stick around after they've been viewed. Certainly they don't stay forever, or else Snapchat users would notice their phone's storage filling up with mysterious dark data.

I tried to follow along with Hickman's account of the hack, but got nowhere, partly because he used a toolkit, AccessData's Mobile Phone Examiner+, to which I do not have access. This can't really be done by a civilian.

Its goal is to make something impermanent in a culture where everything is permanent.Weirdly, it seems as if the method for extraction is being sold. According to KSL.com, Hickman has "derived a method to extract the supposedly no-longer-viewable images and pass them on to parents, lawyers and law enforcement." That article further says that it "costs a family between $300 and $500 to forensically examine Snapchat photos." And that's disturbing; even though it's horrendously difficult to get at the content, authority figures should not have basically exclusive access to it.

The bigger point is that freaking out about a Snapchat hack misses the point of Snapchat. Snapchat is secure enough to serve as a break from permanence on the web. It doesn't have to be perfectly secure to achieve its aims. It isn't even really trying for that, and placing the emphasis on perfect security takes attention away from what Snapchat is actually trying to do.

Snapchat will fix this bug, I'm sure; it's in their best interest to make things as impermanent as possible. And it's in our best interest not to trust our sensitive photos to any messaging service at all. (Kids: don't sext.) But to think this hack means Snapchat is broken is to misunderstand what Snapchat is.