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Today, extensive tooth repair or replacement often requires the installation of a dental bridge made from durable resin and metal. That said, the procedure is nothing new. Archaeological examples of dental bridges date back thousands of years across cultures around the world. Recently, researchers discovered the oldest variant ever found in Scotland, but it’s anything but inconspicuous. According to a study recently published in the British Dental Journal, the medieval dental bridge excavated in Aberdeen was crafted using 20-carat gold.

Simplified bridges made from silver or gold wire called dental ligatures date back to at least 2,500 BCE in ancient Egypt. In some cases, funerary preparers installed them in the recently deceased to make their bodies appear more “complete” for the afterlife. However, it took until the Middle Ages before more complicated dentistry spread throughout Europe. Even then, primary texts suggest tooth maintenance likely wasn’t performed by doctors or surgeons.

“During the Middle Ages, teeth were often treated by barbers, or dentatores, who were individuals that specialized in teeth.”University of Aberdeen archaeologists wrote in their study.

Few dental ligature artifacts exist from England prior to the 17th century, and none of them were found in Scotland before the team’s analysis. That is until 2006. A team digging on the grounds of East Kirk of St. Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen (“kirk” is Scottish for “church”) uncovered a trove of skeletal remains including the skull in this study.. The team recently reexamined 100 of the roughly 900 individuals in the collection—only one of which featured a dental ligature.

35x magnification of the knotted end of the ligature. Credit: Dittmar, et al.

X-ray spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and radiocarbon dating filled in many gaps about the person’s identity. Based on their findings, the researchers believe the remains belonged to a middle-aged man who died in Aberdeen sometime between 1460 and 1670. Dental evidence also revealed his bridge had been installed long before his death.

The 20-carat gold alloy ligature’s existence and composition suggests that the man was not only wealthy, but well connected in his community. Although they can’t definitively know if he received care in Aberdeen, records show around 22 goldsmiths worked in the area during that era. These artisans were likely skilled enough to craft and securely knot the wiring.

The reasons for receiving the implant were probably “multifaceted,” according to the study’s authors. Physical appearance during the Late Medieval and Early Modern eras was often culturally tied to one’s character.

“The appearance of a person and their perceived health was linked to one’s sins,” they explained. “As such, the social importance of an individual’s smile encouraged those who were able to afford such treatments to seek them out.”

Apart from being the first dental discovery of its kind in Scotland, the artifact underscores just how long humans have balanced the complex interplay between wealth, beauty standards, and personal health.

The post A medieval Scot rocked a 20-carat gold dental bridge appeared first on Popular Science.

Four words: sled dog puppy cam. The Puppy Cam at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska is back for the season, and viewers can now watch five future canine rangers in action. Named after various national parks, sled dogs Sequoia, Mammoth, Rainier, Teton, and Mesa were born on March 30. Another pup named Acadia will soon join the team from a partner kennel. Viewers can watch them grow, play, learn, and bond with their human ranger counterparts.

Denali’s sled dogs are actual working rangers, carrying on a tradition of helping protect the park’s wilderness that goes back 104 years. They haul supplies and patrol two million acres of land in one of the most wild places in the United States. Denali Sled Dog Kennels is also one of the oldest sled dog kennels in the country. 

The puppies are freight-style Alaskan huskies. Freight-style huskies have long legs to help them break a trail through the snow, compact paws that resist ice build-up between the toes, in addition to sturdy coats and puffy tails to keep them warm when temperatures plummet well below zero. As far as personality, it’s important that canine rangers are tenacious, have an “unbridled love to pull and run as part of a team,” and good social skills. The kennels receive thousands of admirers every summer, so it’s important that they are not afraid of us humans. 

The mother—or dam—of this new litter is named Spark. She was born in 2023 and is already a Denali Kennels canine ranger. The father–or sire—named Trapper is from Sage Mountain Kennel in Fairbanks, Alaska. Later in May, the Sage Mountain kennel will select two of the puppies from this litter who will stay in Denali for a few more weeks and then return them to Fairbanks to join their teams. Denali will also acquire one puppy from a litter that was born at Middle Earth Mushing Kennels in Fairbanks on April 3.

“Arranged breeding and splitting litters with partners strengthens the health of the kennel’s lineage, as well as the health of all freight-style Alaskan huskies,” Denali National Park and Preserve rangers wrote in a statement.

If the Puppy Cam isn’t enough, visitors to the park can experience the kennels on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Beginning on May 15, the kennels will be open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with a free sled dog program at 2 p.m.

The post Denali’s adorable Sled Dog Puppy Cam is back for 2026 appeared first on Popular Science.

Red means stop. Red means danger. Red means passion. The color conjures up a whole range of emotions and associations. It inspired an entire Taylor Swift album. And yet if someone asked you to describe what red actually looks like, without pointing at something red, you’d hit a wall almost immediately. 

So why is it that a color so evocative and distinctive as red (or any color, for that matter) still manages to elude our attempts to nail it down with words? 

If you just now said, “It’s because color doesn’t exist,” well played!  If you’re like me and your face just turned an indescribable shade of red, welcome to the club. 

“There is no color in the world,” says American neuroscientist Christof Koch. “There are photons of a particular wavelength emitted by the sun that strike an object, and then get reflected into the eye of the viewer. The electrical activity that’s generated there then travels up into the cortex of the brain, and gets processed into something we call color.”

In other words, red isn’t something out there in the world waiting to be objectively and uniformly experienced. It’s something your brain makes up. So does color even actually exist? Neuroscientists think maybe not. At least not in the way we think it does. 

Does color even exist? Short answer: Not really.

Koch, a Meritorious Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, discusses the subjective experience of color using a famous thought experiment called Mary’s Room. Introduced in the 1980s by the philosopher Frank Jackson, the experiment involves a hypothetical neuroscientist, Mary, who lives in a black-and-white room. Mary knows everything there is to know about color: the wavelengths, the photoreceptors, the way color is processed within the visual cortex. She has read every paper and has conducted every experiment. But Mary has never actually seen color.

One day, Mary leaves the black-and-white room. And for the first time in her life, she sees a red tomato.  

The question Jackson posed is deceptively simple: When Mary sees the red tomato, does she learn something new?

Jackson’s answer was yes. Despite knowing everything science could conceivably tell her about color, Mary is confronted by something that no textbook could convey—the actual experience of seeing red. 

“The feeling, the phenomenal quality, whatever you call it—the experience is subjective,” Koch says. “People have invented a dozen words or more to describe it. It remains inexplicable.”

That “it,” Koch says, is the experience itself—the felt sensation of seeing red that no amount of scientific language has ever quite managed to pin down.

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Philosophers call that experience a quale (pronounced KWAH-LAY) the felt, first-person experience of something: the redness of red, the sharpness of pain, the taste of coffee. Unlike the wavelength of red, which can be measured precisely, a quale can’t be objectively measured. It’s entirely an inside job.

Koch says the Mary’s Room thought experiment argues against materialism—the philosophical view that everything in the universe, including human experience, can be explained by physics. If materialism is right, there’s nothing science can’t eventually account for. Mary’s Room suggests otherwise: There are some things that science simply can’t explain.

Everyone see colors differently, but not that differently

For the most part, we go about our days equipped with this surprisingly loose consensus on our shared reality. If your blue isn’t quite the same as my blue, it’s close enough not to cause trouble most of the time. But every once in a while, something happens that reminds us how differently our brains can construct the same reality. 

In 2015, a photograph of a striped dress went viral for a reason that had nothing to do with fashion. The dress appeared blue and black to many, but millions of people looking at the same image saw white and gold, and couldn’t fathom how anyone could see it differently. In what now seems like a quaint public rift, the internet divided around the hotly debated reality of blue/black versus white/gold.

“It’s as though they were looking at the same screen,” says Koch. But “half the population saw one movie and the other half saw a different movie.” 

The explanation, says Koch, has to do with how the brain handles ambiguous lighting. Every time you look at an image, your brain makes an automatic, unconscious calculation about the overall brightness of it. This calculation is based on your habits and life experience. 

Research by NYU neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch, drawing on more than 13,000 participants, found that early risers were significantly more likely to see the dress as white and gold, while night owls tended to see blue and black

Because early risers spend more waking hours in natural daylight, their brains are calibrated to filter out blue light, leaving white and gold. Night owls, accustomed to warmer artificial light, filter that out instead and land on blue and black. 

“You get up early in the morning and see a lot of sunlight, or you get up very late and are primarily up at night with artificial light,” Koch says. “So depending on that implicit assumption, your brain gives rise to these two different percepts: white and gold, or blue and black.” It’s not a conscious, deliberate decision you take to view the dress one way or the other. 

Does this dress look blue and black or white and gold? Your answer might have to do with whether you’re an early riser or night owl. Video: What Colour Is This Dress? (SOLVED with SCIENCE), AsapSCIENCE

For Koch, the dress is a window into something fundamental about human perception.

“There is input from the world, but then your particular brain might make a set of assumptions, and my brain might make a different set of assumptions,” he adds. “We obviously agree most of the time, though, or else we wouldn’t have evolved.”

And for the most part, we do agree. A species that couldn’t agree on some basic shared realities wouldn’t have gotten very far. So don’t worry: Your understanding of red is probably pretty similar to my understanding of red.

We all have unique, built-in filters that change how we see the world

The dress, it turns out, is just the beginning. Koch cites the concept of the “perception box.” Writer and researcher Elizabeth R. Koch (no relation) coined the term in 2021 to describe the hidden forces that shape how we see the world. 

According to this theory, we each have our own unique perception box. Think of two people standing in front of the same abstract painting. One sees something beautiful and moving: The other sees a mess. Same painting, completely different experience. That’s your perception box at work. It’s shaped by your genes, your upbringing, and every experience you’ve ever had. 

“We all live in slightly different perception boxes,” he says. “The walls are invisible, and they can expand or shrink, driven by our genes, our neural wiring, our experience.”

Those walls, Koch says, determine far more than which colors we see. They shape how we interpret relationships, how we process emotions, and even how we react to the evening news. Two people can look at the same event and come away with completely different realities, not because one of them is lying, but because their perception boxes are simply built differently.

When it comes to the color red, you can measure its wavelength. You can map exactly what happens in the brain when the eye encounters it. But the actual experience of redness—that felt, interior, indescribable thing—lives inside your perception box, and nowhere else.

“This applies to any conscious experience,” he says. “It applies to pain, say, due to an infected tooth, or the distress you experience when someone leaves you. It’s true for taste, for boredom, for mystical experience, and for psychedelic experience. It has the same ineffable quality.”

Which brings us back to red. You’ve always known it when you’ve seen it. But that color you see? It’s yours and yours alone.

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Color doesn’t exist—at least not how you think appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’re one of the roughly 1.6 million people who took a cruise in Alaska last year, chances are you sailed through the Tracy Arm fjord. The picturesque, narrow fjord is a popular sightseeing area and is part of the Tongass National Forest, about 40 to 50 miles south of the capital city of Juneau.

In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down the fjord. The tsunami was 1,578-feet-tall, or one-and-a-half times the height of the Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, no one was caught in the wave since it hit around 5:30 a.m. local time. If the tsunami hit later that day, about 20 cruise ships and numerous recreational boaters and kayakers could have been impacted by the giant wave.

In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers studied this “near miss” event, finding that the continued effects of climate change were likely the cause. 

The team studied several eyewitness stories from that day. In one account, a group of kayakers reported waking around 5:45 a.m. to water flowing past their campsite and carrying away a kayak and much of their gear. Another observer aboard a cruise ship near the mouth of the fjord saw currents and white water with no wave, while another eyewitness described a six-foot wave along the beach.

The team of researchers also studied satellite data with NASA’s new Surface Water Ocean Topography satellite before and after the event, in addition to seismic data and numerical modelling to understand exactly what happened that August morning.

Field photos from reconnaissance trip for 2025 Tracy Arm landslide on August 13, 2025. Image: U.S. Geological Survey

“Until now, we simply didn’t have a way to observe these waves directly, but our study has demonstrated that using data from the new Surface Water Ocean Topography satellite can reveal the full sea-surface structure of these events, even if no one witnesses them directly,” Dr. Thomas Monahan, a study co-author and engineer at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. 

Monahan and the other study authors also found that there was not much warning before the landslide hit. 

“Normally with these gigantic rock avalanches, they often give some sort of warning signs in the weeks, months, years prior, when the slope is slowly moving down the mountain. It’s sagging and then it catastrophically gives way in a rock avalanche,” said Dr. Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. “In this case, that didn’t happen.”

Instead, there was some minor seismic noise that was so slight it went completely undetected

“This one was truly a surprise,” Shugar added, noting that this presents some challenges for disaster reduction in high-risk areas.

Importantly, they found that the glacial retreat in the Alaska fjord led to the tsunami. From 1985 to 2020, glacier-covered areas in Alaska decreased by 13 percent. As temperatures continue to rise, glaciers will melt more and begin to retreat or shrink. These frosty mountainsides then can become unstable if the ice that has been in place for centuries melts away.

As cold regions continue to warm, glacier retreat increases the risk of hazards like this landslide, the study argues. Landslide-generated tsunamis like this can produce extreme, localized water inundation that is even bigger than those caused by the tsunamis generated by earthquakes. The size of the waves and narrowness of the fjords can be a recipe for disaster. 

However, carefully monitoring glaciers could help catch these kinds of tsunamis before they happen. This is especially important as climate change continues to affect these regions. The Tracy Arm fjord alone sees upwards of 500,000 visitors per year, so catching tsunamis early is crucial for public safety

“Ultimately what we hope is that coastal municipalities, the cruise ship industry, and other stakeholders take these threats seriously,” said Shugar.

At least six cruise lines, including Carnival Cruise Line, have altered their itineraries in Alaska for 2026 due to the hazards that remain in the Tracy Arm fjord. Additionally, the United States Geological Survey warns that steep, mountainous landslide areas are “inherently unstable.”  The Tracy Arm fjord tsunami will likely continue to change the landscape for years to come.

The post A 1,578-foot tsunami struck a popular Alaskan cruise destination. Now we know why. appeared first on Popular Science.

Convincing, uncannily humanoid robots are no longer the stuff of Star Wars. Sure, you may not have a protocol droid at your ready like the iconic (if neurotic) C-3PO,but you can certainly construct a computer model that imitates Luke Skywalker’s mechanical pal. Combine that with a voice generator and the ability to parse text inputs, and you have a conversational bot ready to accompany you on your next Kessel Run.

Need proof? Sam Potozkin, a Chapman University business analyst and robot enthusiast in Orange County, California, spent dozens of hours designing and assembling his own C-3PO conversation buddy. It may only be limited to one form of communication, but the results are undeniably accurate.

As Interesting Engineering explained, Potozkin first 3D-printed a hollow, plastic model of the robot’s head. From there, he committed himself to hours of sanding to eliminate any obvious seams and rough textures. This was followed by multiple layers of shiny spray paint topped off with the droid’s recognizable gold sheen. Potozkin’s construction culminated with a glossy coating that both protected his creation and gave it that extra bit of realism.

To be truly successful, the faux-3PO’s underlying program needed to convert audio to text, analyze the resultant script, generate a personality-accurate response, and then translate the answer into audio once again. All that work may sound like a tall order,but Potozkin built his entire AI workflow using a Raspberry Pi 5 without external assistance like remote servers.

However, the most impressive aspect to Potozkin’s project may be how C-3PO “talks.” Although the droid needs a microphone to analyze human vocal input, its own voice isn’t channeled through a speaker. Instead, a mechanical exciter vibrates the plastic head itself while additional, overlaid robotic effects bring the whole experience to life.

It’s wild stuff—and it may only be the beginning. Potozkin made all of his computer code and 3D files available for free on GitHub, including instructional documentation. It might take a while before C-3PO’s head gets attached to a functional, bipedal body, but he’s ready to pass the time in idle conversation until then.

In The Workshop, Popular Science highlights the ingenious, delightful, and often surprising projects people build in their spare time. If you or someone you know is working on a hobbyist project that fits the bill, we’d love to hear about it—fill out this form to tell us more.

The post Man 3D prints a chatty C-3PO head powered by AI appeared first on Popular Science.

Pope Leo XIV receives gifts from visitors from all over the world every year, but a newly identified insect may be the first papal tribute of its kind. In the journal Nota Lepidopterologica, entomologists describe a striking moth species recently discovered on the rocky Mediterranean island of Crete. With its royal color scheme and ecological significance, the winged insect lives up to its scientific name—Pyralis papaleonei, or the Pope Leo moth.

“The Pontiff is a strong advocate of climate and environmental protection, and we hope that his voice may serve as an example for humanity,” the study’s authors wrote.

P. papaleonei is the latest in a series of taxonomic revisions within the Peralis regalis species group. Although common across Europe, their widespread presence has proven a liability for entomologists. Recent re-evaluations have uncovered multiple unique subspecies among these often overlooked moths. P. papaleoni represents the newest addition to the family, after researchers from Austria’s Tyrolean State Museum, the Finnish Museum of Natural History, and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology analyzed numerous specimens from the White Mountains located in the western region of the Greek island of Crete.

With a roughly 0.75 inch wingspan, the Pope Leo moth is a moderately sized insect within its group. Its particularly distinctive features include purple forewings accented by multiple white bands and deep orange spots. Molecular analysis showed about a six percent genetic divergence from the next closest relative—more than enough to earn it a new species classification.

For now, researchers know little else about the Pope Leo moth’s lifecycle and biology, although they seem most active around the month of June and appear endemic to Crete. That said, a single specimen observed in October suggests either a prolonged flight season or possible multiple generations over the course of a few months.

About 700 moth species are discovered every year, although most are located in tropical habitats. This makes the Pope Leo moth’s identification particularly noteworthy, but also serves as a vital reminder of the planet’s precarious ecological health.

“We are facing a global biodiversity crisis, yet only a fraction of the world’s species has been scientifically documented,” explained Peter Heumer, the former head of Tyrolean State Museums’ natural science collections and a study co-author. “Effective conservation of biodiversity requires that species are first recognized, described, and named.”

Heumer’s comments echo the Pope Leo moth’s namesake. While speaking at a global church summit on climate change last year, the pope urged a societal transition, “from collecting data to caring, and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles.”

The post New moth species named for Pope Leo appeared first on Popular Science.

For years, cybersecurity experts have been warning about the chaos that highly capable hacking bots could usher in. … Claude Mythos Preview appears to represent not an incremental change but the beginning of a paradigm shift. … Perhaps more concerning than the reported capabilities of Mythos Preview is that other companies are not far behind. (More)

Finding bugs was also hard, so the worst flaws stayed hidden, sometimes for decades. It wasn’t a great system. But the difficulty on both sides created a kind of détente that held. Now, thanks to new A.I. tools, anyone can write code. Soon, bad actors could use those same tools to find out what’s wrong with code. The détente is over. (more)

Use strong passwords that are unique across every site, preferably through a trusted password manager. Better yet, when a site offers a passkey, take it. … For accounts without passkeys, use an authenticator app for two-factor authentication, not text messages. Always keep all your software up to date, and uninstall unnecessary apps. (more)

OK, I’m a few weeks late to this party, but not too late to give many of you news: We may soon face a period (a few years?) of greatly reduced software availability.

For many decades, we have known how to write pretty secure software. It takes a bit longer, and security considerations must be central to early design efforts, but it is possible. However, developers have usually been in too much of a rush to market to do this. So most software systems today are riddled with security holes. What has saved them so far is that it takes humans a lot of work to find and exploit such holes.

However, there now exist powerful AI systems that are far better at finding and using such holes. Soon (within a year or two?) many AI firms will have such tools, and they will spread to be widely available. Yes, such AI systems can also work to patch such holes, but computer security experts tell me that the nature of insecure systems is to make it much easier to find and use than to patch such holes. Attack beats defense.

Software firms would then more eagerly rewrite their code to use more secure designs, and AI could help them to do this. But this takes time, and as there isn’t a lot of secure software out there now, AI hasn’t had big datasets ready to help them learn how to do this well. So it will take some time to replace weak with strong software.

So there may soon be a period, starting within a few years, maybe lasting a few years, when most actual software systems can cheaply be hacked. This will make such software firms vulnerable to ransomware, and make customers wary of using their products. Customers, firms, and App stores, will respond by cutting back on what software systems they offer, and by simplifying them by dropping many features.

As our world has come to rely on software for a great many things, it seems quite concerning that we might soon have to make do with substantially less software. How vulnerable are crucial systems like electricity, cars, traffic lights, voting systems, and payment systems? I don’t think we know. Beware the coming Hackastrophe.

Note: such an event would likely make the public much more willing to regulate AI. And if credit card firms get overwhelmed with false sales, that could make crypto more attractive.

There are three pipelines operating now to take oil around the Hormuz blockage. The East-West Crude Oil Pipeline (Petroline) in Saudi Arabia, and the UAE’s ADCOP pipeline and the Iraq Kirkuk–Ceyhan (Turkey) Pipeline. The Iraq Turkey pipelin is at an initial ~250k bpd but could ramp over the next month or two to 400k-650k bpd. ...

Read more

Cambridge, MA, 5th May 2026, CyberNewswire

This colorful cloud over Jonggol, Indonesia, is not a portal to the land of Oz. Or the rainbow road into Asgard from Norse mythology. Or even an AI-generated image. They are iridescent clouds, a rare type of cloud that appear when raindrops interact with sunlight. 

According to WABC meteorologist Lee Goldberg, the small water droplets or ice crystals inside of the cloud scatter sunlight, diffracting the light into a spectrum of colors. The rainbow effect is most visible when the sun is partially blocked by something like a mountain or thicker clouds.  

“These vibrant displays usually appear near the sun and can last for only a few moments—making them a truly magical sight for anyone lucky enough to catch them,” Goldberg writes.

Ida Pramuwardani, Acting Director of Public Meteorology at the Indonesian climate agency BKMG, told Detik News that the cloud in the video taken over the city southeast of Jakarta is a towering cumulus cloud blocking part of the rainbow.

“At the same time, there are towering cumulus clouds that can cover part of the rainbow, so that the shape looks incomplete or looks like a ‘rainbow cloud’,” Pramuwardani said in a translated interview. 

These clouds are also not a direct sign that a storm is coming in. Instead, rainbow clouds indicate that convective clouds are growing and that there is the possibility that rain will start to fall soon. 

Understandably, the beautiful sight reportedly stopped traffic, as onlookers rushed to capture footage of these candy colored clouds.  

The post No, these rainbow clouds over Indonesia are not AI appeared first on Popular Science.

We all know the feeling—a throbbing in your throat that won’t go away. Coughing offers only a momentary respite as your sore throat worsens throughout the day. At times like these, many of us reach for a soothing lozenge to calm the irritation and provide some relief, at least for a short while.

But what about when the tickle comes back and you reach for another throat lozenge? How many cough drops is too many cough drops? And what’s the worst that can happen if you go overboard?

Dr. Kait Brown, clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers, assures that dangerous cough drop overdoses are extremely rare. But that doesn’t mean we should pop them like candy.

“What we get concerned about is the menthol within the cough drops, and rarely there may be some that have benzocaine, which is a local anaesthetic,” she says. In very high doses, these ingredients can cause symptoms, including vomiting, dizziness, and even seizures.

Menthol-based cough drops can soothe but also irritate

Menthol is an organic compound derived from peppermint or eucalyptus oils. In moderate doses, it acts as a counterirritant, producing a cooling and numbing effect on the inner throat. But if used to excess, the same compound can start to irritate the body’s mucus membranes.

One study by the Wisconsin Research and Education Network found that high menthol consumption was associated with longer-lasting coughs. Although more research is needed, this could suggest that irritation from cough drop overuse can prevent a cough from healing.

Extreme menthol overuse can also produce acute symptoms. “With larger doses, which is rare, we can see early symptoms that are more gastrointestinal in nature, so some nausea or vomiting,” Dr Brown says. “That’s from irritation of the stomach mucus membrane when you swallow those cough drops.

If these early symptoms are ignored, menthol’s pleasant numbing sensation can become dangerous.

“At really high doses it can affect neural transmission from those receptors, which could then result in neurological symptoms,” Brown explains. “Severe symptoms of a large menthol overdose would include things like confusion or changes in mental state, getting a little more sleepy or dizzy. And really severe cases would be things like seizures.”

It’s very, very hard to overdose on cough drops

Thankfully, it is not easy to consume enough cough drops to put you at risk of menthol toxicity.

A typical cough drop contains five to 10 mg of menthol. Toxicologists consider a lethal dose of menthol to be 50 to 150 mg per kilogram of body weight, although some estimates put the figure as high as 1,000 mg per kilogram.

This means that an adult weighing 170 pounds would have to eat 400 menthol-rich cough drops in a sitting to reach even the lowest threshold for a lethal dose. Considering that there’s usually only 20 to 30 cough drops in a standard bag, that’d be the equivalent of going through at least 13 full bags of lozenges.

Most cough drops, including Ricola, contain menthol. Menthol can be lethal at extremely high doses, but that doesn’t mean you have to likely curb your cough drop use. Image: MaxBaumann / Getty Images MaxBaumann

Reported deaths from menthol overdose are extremely rare. One of the only cases in the medical literature involved a worker in India who died suffering from seizures and kidney failure ten days after cleaning a tank in a peppermint factory. 

Another extreme case involved an 86-year-old man who was found unconscious by neighbors and rushed to the emergency room suffering from weakness, muscle ache, disorientation, ulcers, and heartburn. He admitted to consuming two bags of cough drops a day for twenty years, suggesting potential risks from chronic overuse.

Although some unpleasant side effects could be expected at much less excessive doses, most adults are unlikely to reach this level just to get them through a cold or flu.

“There’s a relative margin of safety with the menthol-based cough drops,” Brown says. She prefers not to estimate a safe quantity, for fear of promoting unhealthy usage, but stresses that “if you follow the instructions on the packet, you’re going to be within a window of safety.”

Why benzocaine makes cough drops more dangerous

Brown cautions that particular care is necessary if using cough drops containing benzocaine or other local anaesthetics.

“We don’t largely see benzocaine in these preparations anymore because of the risk of overdose associated with it,” she says. 

“You can get a condition called methemoglobinemia, which changes the capacity of your blood to carry oxygen. You can end up having too little oxygen delivered to your cells and that can result in things like bluing of the lips and hands and can be life-threatening.”

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What to do for a cough drop overdose

If anyone is worried that they’ve overused cough drops, Brown recommends contacting the America’s Poison Centers helpline at 1-800-22-1222. This is a national nonprofit service that advises Americans worried about exposure to common toxins. 

“There are healthcare professionals with extra toxicology training that can walk you through that specific scenario,” Dr Brown explains. “They can recommend that you stay home, or they’ll let you know if you need to seek a higher level of care.”

During her work at America’s Poison Centers, she says she has received many calls about cough drops, mostly from people reporting mild symptoms or just wanting to discuss incidents of potential overuse.

“It’s children we get most concerns about, because they’re most likely to use the product inadvertently,” she says. Although it is rare for children to consume enough cough drops to cause acute symptoms, she advises always leaving the product out of reach of children—and sometimes adults as well.

“When people are sick, maybe they don’t have the energy to think as clearly as they normally would,” she says. 

“We caution people that if you know you’re going to be using cough drops all day, take out the allotted amount that the package says you can have. That way you know you’re not exceeding the quantity you can safely use.”

But if you do have a few extra drops, there’s no need to panic—you’ll probably be just fine.

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Can you overdose on cough drops? Short answer: Yes. appeared first on Popular Science.

Life at high altitudes is unforgiving. The thin air and atmosphere make breathing and other bodily functions difficult—especially for humans. However, a cave over 7,000 feet above sea level in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain is forcing archaeologists to rethink how often our prehistoric ancestors made use of these heights. 

A team found a cave in Spain full of hearths, jewelry, and human remains, indicating that people may have been living at this incredibly high altitude as long as 5,500 years ago. A child’s finger bone and a baby tooth discovered among the rock also means this cave may have been a burial site. The cave and its findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

For decades, archeologists believed that high-mountain environments like these were places that prehistoric communities only passed through occasionally. Cave 338 is 7,332 feet above sea level in Spain’s Núria Valley. The team dug through four distinct rock layers, with the oldest dating back 6,000 years ago. The most recent layer was thin, indicating that it was not frequently used. 

But layers two and three had plenty of surprises. The team found 23 hearths, all with crushed, burned green mineral fragments. The green fragments resemble malachite, a mineral that is rich in copper. From these preliminary clues, the team suspects that Cave 338 was a high-altitude mining camp between 3,000 and 5,500 years ago. 

Fragments of malachite, a mineral rich in copper, recovered during the excavations at Cave 338. Image: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

“Many of these fragments are thermally altered, while other materials in the cave are not, which clearly suggests that fire played an important role in their processing and that there was a deliberate intention behind it,” Dr. Julia Montes-Landa, a study co-author and archaeologist and archaeometallurgist at the University of Granada in Spain, said in a statement. “In other words, they weren’t burned by accident.” 

The hearths also cut across each other, indicating that the visitors to the cave reused it frequently. They are also distinct, showing their visits were separated by a good chunk of time.

In the third rock layer, the team found a finger bone and a baby tooth belonging to at least one child who died around the age of 11. This could mean that more human remains are buried deeper within the cave, but there is currently not enough evidence to determine a cause of death or if the bone and tooth belong to the same child. 

However, two pendants found in the second layer offered more information about the possible remains. One pendant is made from a shell and the other a brown bear tooth and dates to around the second millennium BCE. 

A pendant made from a bear incisor was recovered during the excavations at Cave 338. Image: IPHES-CERCA.

“The shell pendant is interesting because it has parallels in other sites in Catalonia, which suggests shared traditions or connections between different communities,” Dr. Carlos Tornero, a study co-author and zooarcheologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, said in a statement. “The bear tooth pendant is much less common. That might point to something more specific or symbolic, possibly linked to the local environment.” 

While Cave 338 was not a full-time home, those who came here must have found their trips up the mountain valuable enough to keep returning for thousands of years. 

“We can’t say exactly how long people stayed each time, but the repeated use of the space and the density of remains suggest occupations that were short to medium in duration, but happening again and again over long periods of time,” Torneo added. 

The team still has numerous questions about how and when humans used the cave and hope to get a definitive answer on the chemical composition of the mysterious green mineral during upcoming field work this summer. 

The post Prehistoric child’s finger bone, bear tooth pendant, and more discovered in Spanish cave appeared first on Popular Science.

Starlink supplier projects 100M starlink high speed internet terminals 2028 and 200 million 2030. This is inline with my projections from last week based on looking at customers and price points. I divided up countries into high speed internet subscription tiers. And I have project may ten Starship launches in 2026 and 100 in 2027 ...

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During a high-volume deluge test on the new Orbital Launch Pad 2 one of the methalox gas generators that supplies high-pressure nitrogen for the deluge system exploded. The explosion sent roof panels and debris flying. There was the target launch of May 12 for the 12th SpaceX Starship flight. This could be delayed by 1-2 ...

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Tesla has added another 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin, Dallas and Houston. There are hundreds parked and ready to be added. This is likely an undercount because the crowdsourcwed robotaxitracker.com miss over half of the supervised vehicles for Tesla and Waymo. Just getting Dallas and Houston to the Austin level with population and other adjustments ...

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The key innovation that has powered the modern era is: organizations. We solve a great many problems by creating an org, setting it tasks, giving it powers and resources, and putting some key “masters” in charge.

Besides participating as suppliers, customers, employees, or targets of such orgs, there are two other key ways we engage such orgs: politics and governance. In politics, we take sides among the different alliances of masters and tasks, struggling for who will dominate. In governance, we try to hold masters accountable for achieving tasks, and seek new better ways to choose, reward, and monitor them.

Low status folks have long been advised to keep their head down and stay out of both politics and governance. Higher status folks, in contrast, are somewhat encouraged to do politics, if they are willing to risk suffering repression when their allies lose. We like democracy as more of us can more safely be political, and thus see ourselves as high status, though politics becomes less safe as political polarization rises.

However, most folks are well advised to stay out of governance, at least when that involves any substantial chance of holding masters more accountable, and thus cutting into their spoils. Masters coordinate to block cuts to their spoils. (Yes, some spoils come via achieving promised tasks, but most don’t.) In contrast, masters don’t mind and even like governance changes that don’t risk stronger accountability. Such as making it more popular, inclusive, decentralized, more intensive participation, etc.

How much should you fear masters displeased by your meddling in governance? Greatly! Org masters, and their allies and wannabes, are the fiercest predators of our world. Smart, energetic, and well-connected, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, smiling broadly, speaking gently and grandly, but holding their fangs and claws ready in shadows to strike when ready.

Alas, our world has long suffered from poor governance. So much so that for most problems we know how to solve, we don’t actually solve them. We got better enough at governance to allow the modern world to have big orgs, but just barely.

Today, our civilization faces problems so huge that we will mostly likely fall, as did the Roman Empire, to be replaced by insular fertile cultures like the Amish and Haredim. Better governance seems our best hope here, and promising alternatives do exist, ones that can be tested at small scales before deploying on larger scales. Alas such efforts are mainly blocked by spoil-protecting masters. Will enough of us risk their displeasure to force such innovation experiments in time?

We vary in our motives and priorities in thinking. For example, some try to impress, some try to sell others on pre-existing positions, some try to show loyalty and support to teams, and some try to figure stuff out. As we have norms against the other motives, when asked, many of us claim to have this last widely admired motive.

Yet, strikingly, few in public discussions present themselves as trying to figure things out together with their convo partners. Such as by posing problems and questions, reframing these to avoid sloppiness, offering alternative options and answers, noting puzzling or contrary consequences, and admitting when one’s prior convo moves are undermined by new points made.

Yes, presenting a figuring-stuff-out-together convo persona often imposes some costs relative to other possible personas. But the more eager that we are to suppress other possible interpretations of their motives, the more eager we should be to pay such costs, to assert our preferred persona.

I have to conclude that while we usually don’t want to directly admit that we seek to impress, sell, or support, we don’t actually much mind observers inferring such motives in us. Few actually have that much respect for people those who try to figure stuff out together.

Granular Unit Economics per MW Cruseo CEO Lochmiller broke down the inputs/outputs with high precision (April 2025 contract pricing and the talk) Upfront capex is ~$59M per MW of developed capacity. Roughly half (~$30M) is IT (GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage, etc.). The rest covers data center build, power plant/generation, and other infrastructure. Annual revenue (pure ...

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SpaceX Starship Flight 12 is scheduled to launch May 12, 22:30 UTC / 17:30 CDT An advisory has appeared on the CADENA Operational Information System. – NEW Trajectory – Afternoon Launch Window.

Semianalysis AI Value Capture – The Shift To Model Labs Anthropic is now making $44 billion per year run rate and this is heading to $100 billion per year by the end of 2026. As of today, Memory SOCAMM contract pricing paid by Nvidia at ~$8/GB in 1Q26, a sharp step-up from 4Q25 to 1Q26. ...

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