At least two Nile crocodiles were found living in the warm swamps of Florida, but it’s not clear how the animals got all the way from Africa to the U.S.

A ten-foot Nile Crocodile photographed in Okavango River Delta, Botswana.

Barcroft / Via Getty Images

At least two Nile crocodiles native to Africa have been found living in the wild in Florida — with more possibly lurking — where they pose a threat to the already fragile Everglades ecosystem and could cause serious injury to people.

How the Nile crocodiles arrived in Florida is not clear, but DNA evidence published in a new study suggests they were likely brought from Africa as part of the exotic pet trade.

"They didn't swim from Africa," University of Florida herpetologist Kenneth Krysko said. "But we really don't know how they got into the wild."

The research published in the peer-reviewed Herpetological Conservation and Biology said that DNA from at least two crocodiles captured in Florida were closely related to a Nile crocodile from South Africa.

Samples taken from captive crocodiles in Disney's Animal Kingdom and local zoos did not share similarities with the Nile crocodiles found in the Everglades, further suggesting someone brought the species illegally into the state as a pet.

Joe Wasilewski hold with a captured Nile crocodile in Florida in 2012.

J Pat Carter / Via AP

The Nile crocodile, which lives mostly in the eastern half of Africa and reaches lengths of up to 20 feet, is a much larger and more aggressive creature than Florida's native species: the American crocodile.

The invasive croc is known to prey upon a large range of animals, including cattle and humans. Nile crocodiles fatally attacked 354 people between 2010 and 2014, while the American crocodile has never been known to kill humans.

The Nile crocodile may also prey on American crocodiles, which are already endangered due to human encroachment on their environment as well as introduced species, like the Burmese Python. The Nile crocodile could also breed with the American crocodile, resulting in hybrids and changing genetics.

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Back in September, a small number of Taco Bell customers were introduced to a new concept: a taco shell made of fried chicken, use to make was then dubbed the "Naked Crispy Chicken Taco." It was the Tex-Mex chain's response to KFC's Double Down, a sandwich that uses fried chicken filets for buns.

This creation was offered only as a small test in Bakersfield, California. It later made its way to restaurants in Kansas City in mid April.

And it's not over yet.

Taco Bell told BuzzFeed News that the product — renamed the "Naked Chicken Chalupa" following the successful launch of the Quesalupa earlier this year — hasn't been approved for a national launch yet, but things are looking good. It's still in test mode, but "the results and consumer feedback are very encouraging," according to a spokesman.

"We're just planning what's the right the timing," Kat Garcia, Taco Bell's senior manager of marketing, said.

The 5.5-inch, 4-ounce chicken shells arrive at the restaurants seasoned and breaded. They get fried into a taco shape using this contraption, which has also been used to shape other things at Taco Bell, like the Waffle Taco.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

The idea for the chicken shell goes back to 2013, when Taco Bell Senior Director of Innovation Heather Mottershaw — better known as the mastermind behind the Waffle Taco — imagined a taco shell made from chicken milanese.

But senior managers, including Chief Marketing Officer Marisa Thalberg, were not instantly on board. "They really weren't into it because it is so different," Garcia said.

"Think of all the crazy firsts that have existed in time and civilization," Thalberg told BuzzFeed News. "Dare we say even the creation of the wheel probably seemed a little odd at first until someone said, 'Ah, that's really a good thing!"

The dream of a fried chicken shell may have never been realized if not for the diligence of Steve Gomez, Taco Bell's manager of product development. He calls it "a passion project," and made it his mission to get other employees to try it. Looking back, he says he "was probably borderline annoying" in efforts to spread the word.

To even get to the test phase in 2015, the team had to shop the product to executives in headquarters, and then work with suppliers and stores to explore the viability of offering it at a larger scale.

This is what the fried poultry shell looks like if you unfold it.

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

The challenge, according to Garcia, is assuring consumers that the chicken shell isn't weird fair food or "jestery." "We wanted to make sure people took it seriously," she said.

"When you explain it to someone they create a visualization in their mind, but it you put it in front of someone and say, 'Try it,' then it's like, 'Okay, I get it,'" Gomez said.

The meaty new chalupa, in fact, basically just tastes like a fried chicken wrap without the wrap. And it's spicy, and stuffed with lettuce, tomato, cheese and avocado ranch sauce.

Taco Bell has found in the test that the vegetables somehow manage to give the meaty, deep-fried chalupa a "health halo" in the eyes of consumers. "We were getting feedback like, 'Its so healthy. It's so fresh," said Garcia. "That really surprised us because it's fried chicken."

Venessa Wong / BuzzFeed News

"We're not going to market it as a health food item — I promise," said Thalberg.

If the Naked Chicken Chalupa does well, there will likely be other versions of it down the road. "Every year the benchmark gets higher and higher for new, big taco innovation ideas," said Gomez.

Taco Bell's approach to product innovation typically is focused on new product lines that it can expand with variations and flavors, such as the Doritos Locos Tacos, but with a deep fried chicken shell, "It really feels like you're at the end of the innovation line. What do you do next?" said Garcia. "We will think of something of course."

Everything You Need To Know About Taco Bell’s New Fried Chicken Taco Shell

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The Surface of Europa An enhanced-color view, this image covers a 350 by 750 kilometer swath across the surface of Jupiter's tantalizing moon Europa. The close-up combines high-resolution image data with lower resolution color data from observations made in 1998 by the Galileo spacecraft. Smooth ice plains, long fractures, and jumbled blocks of chaos terrain are thought to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath. Though the ice-covered alien ocean world is outside the Solar System's habitable zone, new studies show the potential chemistry driving its oxygen and hydrogen production, a key indicator of the energy available for life, could produce amounts comparable in scale to planet Earth. Hydrogen would be generated by chemical reactions of the salty water in contact with the rocky ocean floor. Oxygen and other compounds that react with hydrogen would come from Europa's surface. There water ice molecules would be split apart by the intense flux of high-energy radiation from Jupiter and cycled into the Europan ocean from above.

Hovertext: She's probably out there somewhere, but, man, kids are expensive.

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“Unsightly Genital Rashes: A Colouring Book.”

Comedian Scott Rogowsky is back at it again with a sequel to his incredibly popular video where he reads fake books on the subway.

This time Scott is joined by fellow YouTuber Akilah Hughes aka Smoothiefreak.

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The premise is simple: the pair board a subway with a ridiculous book cover and sit there for the whole train to appreciate.

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The fact that filmmakers have their hearts set on bringing a movie based on Tetris to live isn't news. The fact that Threshold Entertainment has secured $80 million in funding for a hypothetical Tetris movie is. That's a lot of money, and a lot of qu...

The debate surrounding the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has been raging for years and continues to do so. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has finally weighed in on the matter and found GMOs to not just...

The longer a trade show goes on, the more potential there is for epic disaster. As the Bambu team continues to try and make contacts, the distractions begin to pile up and cash runs low. When Dan dips into the company's funds, things quickly get awkw...

ISS and Mercury Too Transits of Mercury are relatively rare. Monday's leisurely 7.5 hour long event was only the 2nd of 14 Mercury transits in the 21st century. If you're willing to travel, transits of the International Space Station can be more frequent though, and much quicker. This sharp video frame composite was taken from a well-chosen location in Philadelphia, USA. It follows the space station, moving from upper right to lower left, as it crossed the Sun's disk in 0.6 seconds. Mercury too is included as the small, round, almost stationary silhouette just below center. In apparent size, the International Space Station looms larger from low Earth orbit, about 450 kilometers from Philadelphia. Mercury was about 84 million kilometers away. (Editor's note: The stunning video includes another double transit, Mercury and a Pilatus PC12 aircraft. Even quicker than the ISS to cross the Sun, the aircraft was about 1 kilometer away.)

Missed the point.

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This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read their continuously updated list of deals at TheWirecutter.com. You may have already seen Engadget posting reviews from our friends at The Wirecutter....

BT will broadcast coverage of both the UEFA Champions League and Europa League finals for free on YouTube. The company confirmed today that it will show both matches on BT Sport TV channels across Sky, Virgin, YouView and Freeview, but will also give...

A billboard with the unusual message of encouraging texting while driving was showcased this week along the the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, Ontario. The ad, which says it's for the Wathan Funeral Home, isn't a way to drum up business for a mortua...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt made its debut a year ago with a massive open world, a dizzying amount of quests to complete and plenty of reasons to keep coming back. After its first DLC Hearts of Stone served up a massive chunk of new content late 2015, t...

This week, Walmart sued Visa in New York State Court, saying it wanted to be able to require PIN authorizations on all EMV debit card transactions. Although many debit card transactions already require a PIN to authorize purchases or withdrawals on that card, Visa makes its merchants give Visa card holders the option to authorize with a signature. Walmart is arguing that this puts its customers at risk for fraud.

Visa, Mastercard, and other card networks set an October 2015 deadline for merchants and card issuers in the US to shift to the chip-based EMV standard (which is eponymous for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, the three groups that developed the standard). The transition was meant to replace the magnetic stripe cards that persisted for years in the US, even after other countries quickly made the transition to the more secure chip-based cards. Walmart made the transition early last year, becoming one of the first national retailers to buy new terminals that accepted EMV cards, the Wall Street Journal reports.

But even though the EMV standard accepts PIN authorization on all cards, the major card networks said they would allow signature authorization to persist in the US and not require PIN authorization, claiming that it would minimize confusion among customers who might have trouble adapting to the new standard. Others objected to the authorization leniency, arguing that signature authorization does nothing to prevent fraud against a card holder if their card is physically stolen.

In a statement to the WSJ, Walmart said that the suit was about “protecting our customers’ bank accounts when they use their debit cards at Walmart.” Still, the paper notes that there's a monetary side to Walmart's legal salvo as well—for every signature-authorized transaction, Walmart must pay Visa five cents more than it does on a PIN-authorized transaction. According to the WSJ, about 10 percent of Visa debit-card-using customers at Walmart will ask to override the PIN authorization prompt at the checkout counter in favor of authorizing the transaction with a signature.

Mastercard, on the other hand, lets retailers choose how they will allow customers to authorize transactions.

Walmart has fought against card networks and issuers for years. One of its most recent battles involved leading a consortium of retailers to create the Merchant Customer Exchange, known as MCX, which tried and failed to launch CurrentC, a system that would authorize payments to the store directly from a customer's checking account with the help of a QR code on the customer's phone, essentially circumventing the interchange fees paid by the retailer to the credit card companies. When CurrentC failed, Walmart launched Walmart Pay in a continued attempt to wrest control from mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay.

It's a good time for Blizzard Entertainment right now, as the company celebrates over 9.7 million players having played team-based shooter Overwatch. During the Open Beta across Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, players amassed over 81 million hours of...

For her "unparalleled success online," Kim Kardashian will receive the first-ever Break the Internet Award at the 2016 Webbys. With nearly 70 million Instagram followers and 45 million Twitter followers, the Webby Awards are calling the 35-year-old K...

In cartoon worlds, squiggly lines over characters are reserved for the exceptionally smelly. But, in reality, everyone deserves those little squiggles: each of us is constantly emitting a steady stream of gases and microbes, as well as smells. And those gases may be able to reveal more about us than what we last ate (and whether it agreed with us). Our gases may also divulge what we think about movies.

In a study involving 9,500 moviegoers, researchers found that the chemicals that audience members off-gas while viewing a film reproducibly vary depending on the type of scene they’re watching. Specifically, the researchers noted synchronized changes in the amounts of specific gases during funny and thrilling bits of movies. The finding, published in the journal Scientific Reports, provides a whiff of evidence that humans may use volatile chemicals as signals. While much more data is needed to support that hypothesis, the authors speculate that audience emissions may be useful for evaluating whether movies are truly funny or thrilling.

For the study, researchers hooked up a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) to the out-going air vents of a theater during 108 showings of 16 different films, including Buddy, The Hobbit, and Carrie. The PRT-MS measured 100 of the 872 volatile chemicals humans are known to emit, with a detection limit of sub-parts per billion.

Looking through the gas profiles of different audiences watching the same film, the researchers noted synchronized and reproduced spikes in certain chemicals. For instance, the authors noted two peaks of isoprene—an insoluble gas associated with cholesterol synthesis in humans—at specific times during The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The peak times, the authors report, correspond to “key moments in the film when the heroine’s dress catches fire and when the final battle begins.”

The researchers next went through each movie and gave each movie scene a label. The labels included sex, comedy, suspense, and mystery. Next, the researchers analyzed the data with a supercomputer to look for more correlations between scene types and chemical emissions.

The researchers found the strongest chemical links to comedy and suspense/injury scenes. Injury scenes, a subset of suspense, were linked to spikes in methanol, acetaldehyde, 2-furanone, and butadiene. “These could be interpreted as an evolutionarily advantageous alert/stand-down signal, if perceivable by others,” the authors speculate. The emission patterns could also act as objective measures of film quality, they conclude.

Scientific Reports, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/srep25464  (About DOIs).

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Today, I went on a date with my long time crush of three years. Everything was going great, until I found out he supports Donald Trump. FML

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Here are the most moving, sorrowful, and beautiful pictures from the past week.

A mother shows her three-month-old baby boy's feet with 16 toes the city of Yueyang, in Hunan Province, China. The boy, named Hong Hong, was born with 15 fingers and 16 toes. His mother was also born with extra extremities, having six fingers on each of her hands and six toes on each of her feet. A doctor at Hunan Province People's Hospital told Hong's father that his son should have an operation between six months and one-year-old.

Vcg / Getty Images

Christian Orthodox worshippers hold up candles lit from the "Holy Fire" as thousands gather in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City during the Orthodox Easter ceremonies. This ceremony has been celebrated in the same way for eleven centuries and is marked by the appearance of a "sacred fire" in the two cavities on either side of the Holy Sepulchre.

Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty Images

A Kenya Wildlife Services ranger stands guard in front of illegal stockpiles of burning elephant tusks at the Nairobi National Park. Eleven giant pyres of tusks were set alight on Saturday as Kenya torched its vast ivory stockpile in a grand gesture aimed at shocking the world into stopping the slaughter of elephants. Lighting the fire in Nairobi's national park, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta demanded a total ban on trade in ivory to end the "murderous" trafficking and prevent the extinction of elephants in the wild.

Carl De Souza / AFP / Getty Images

A crate carrying one of 33 lions rescued from circuses in Peru and Colombia is lifted onto the back of a semi before being transported to a private reserve in Johannesburg, South Africa. 24 of the animals were rescued in raids on circuses operating in Peru, with the rest voluntarily surrendered by a circus in Colombia after Colombia's Congress passed a bill prohibiting circuses from using wild animals.

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

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I’m…intrigued and puking.

Around this time every year in Narcisse, Manitoba, tens of thousands of snakes slither out of their hibernation holes. At the same time. To create this massive traffic pile of snakes.

Manitoba Conservation / gov.mb.ca

SNAKES ON SNAKES ON SNAKES.

CBC / Twitter: @CanadaBday

EVERY WHICH WHERE.

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About 75,000 of them, to be precise. Slinking in and out of each other.

Blegghhhhhhhhh.

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“As long as we are doing this as a family, we got this.”

This is Vinny Desautels, a 7-year-old boy who had been growing his hair out for two years to donate to children with cancer.

Ron Desautels / Via gofundme.com

While growing out his hair, he was teased relentlessly by his classmates, his family wrote on the crowd-funding page for his illness.

"He was mistaken for a girl many times," his father, Jason Desautels, told a local Fox News affiliate. "But Vinny took it like a champ and was like, 'Nah, I'm a boy.'"

"I want to help people so they don't have to go to the doctors to fight cancer," Vinny Desautles said.

So when he turned 7, he donated his 13 inches of locks to create wigs for children undergoing chemotherapy.

"Everyone got excited when mom cut the ponytails off," Vinny added. "I was happy."

But a few months after he cut his hair, the 7-year-old was diagnosed with "aggressive" cancer in his hip and eye bone, his parents said.

FOX / Via fox40.com

"On Thursday, Vinny came home from school complaining about knee pain," according to the crowd-funding page, which appears to have been written by Desautels' grandparents.

The family did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News' request for comment, but according to the crowd-funding page, Vinny's cancer was discovered after complaining about knee pain. Not long after a large growth was identified on his Iliac bone, doctors identified a "malignant mass on [his] eye that appears to be aggressive."

"Vinny is taking all of this like a brave little turd," the family wrote. "There are many more tests ahead and they're in the hospital for an undetermined amount of time."

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