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Melbourne, Florida, 30th July 2026, CyberNewswire

In 39 BCE, a Roman governor decided to drive a message home to revolters in present-day Spain in the bluntest way possible. Among the many recently discovered artifacts at an archaeological site near the eastern Pyrenees in Catalonia, researchers identified a pair of slingshot bullets inscribed with “CN D.” The name behind the abbreviation? Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, a general and ally to the emperor Augustus who helped quash an uprising known as the Ceretani Revolt.

The ancient namesake ammunition detailed by researchers at Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona is only the latest example of Roman soldiers’ penchant for taunting their enemies from afar. At a 2,100-year-old siege site in the present-day Golan Heights, archaeologists recently excavated similar sling bullets inscribed with jeers like “Learn your lesson!” In this case, however, the message appears more of an announcement of who was in charge of stamping out the local rebellion.

Researchers found the lead bullets near the Catalonian town of Urús, about 70 miles north of Barcelona. They also found various coins, garment brooches, soldiers’ items, and Roman military sandal iron studs called clavi caligae. While most of the artifacts date to around the early first century BCE, the sling ammunition inscriptions offer a much more concrete time period. “CN D” stands for “CN(eus) D(omitius),” or Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, a Roman military commander and the governor of the province Hispania Citerior during what’s known as the Ceretani Revolt around 39 BCE.

The Ceretani were an Indigenous community who farmed, herded, and mined within the Cerdanya region of Catalonia during the Iron Age. The area’s roadways, grazing fields, and natural resources made it a target of the Roman Empire during their lengthy conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Although the nearly 200-year-long campaign was nearly finished by the time that Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus arrived, the Ceretani remained one of the last pockets of resistance.

In his account of the era, the Roman historian Cassius Dio described a Ceretani ambush on the general’s soldiers around 39 BCE. Upon learning of their retreat, Calvinus punished his troops by reportedly executing one-in-10 men from two units before setting his sights on the rebels. The quick, decisive defeat marked Rome’s final domination of the peninsula and solidified their influence over regional trade and military routes.

Prior to discovering the archaeological site near Urús, experts believed Calvinus’ campaign took place farther west into the Pyrenees. Evidence like the personalized sling bullets now indicate combat occurred closer to the Ceretani heartland.

However, life was far from peaceful in the aftermath. Following the campaign, Rome aggressively eradicated and restructured local settlements, while instituting repressive laws designed to assimilate the area into the greater empire. With artifacts like the bullets, archaeologists now have a better understanding of where the nearly two-century-long struggle finally ended—and who took responsibility for the conquest.

The post Roman soldiers pelted rebels with signed slingshot bullets appeared first on Popular Science.

SpaceX can achieve daily flight turnaround even with imperfect tiles. The shuttle’s problem was not just that the tiles were expensive. But one bad tile would cause loss of the vehicle. SpaceX Starship metal structure and ablative layers means a single lost tile in most places does not lose the ship. Starship tolerant to losing ...

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On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when different from you. Today, future AIs are our descendants, not co-existing rivals.

Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.

But the concept of “descendant” is a technical term in the general theory of Darwinian selection. I’m using this concept literally, not metaphorically. DNA-based evolution is a special case of this general theory, and for many hundreds of thousands of years human evolution has been driven mostly by a different, non-DNA, kind of Darwinian selection: cultural evolution.

The general Darwinian theory is that a tendency of things to cause similar future things with a similar tendency is selected for. When such selection is possible, it happens, and such things tend to spread everywhere possible. Those selected similar future things are “descendants”. And evolved creatures do tend to indulge descendants.

This process selects in part for things that persist over time, as the future version of a thing is in fact a similar future thing. And it selects for a thing changing other co-existing things with similar tendencies to become more similar to this thing. But most important, it selects for the creation of more new similar things with similar tendencies. So when humans influence other humans to have similar behaviors, without influencing their DNA, these others count as cultural evolution descendants.

How about if you kick pebbles in some direction, which then hit other pebbles, knocking them in similar directions? Yes, those are technically also “descendants”. They just aren’t usually very valuable ones, in term of promoting your influence on the universe, as they share very few features with you. Also, friction typically drains away their total momentum, so they all soon stop, ending this lineage. Somewhat like infertile “mules” made by mating horses and donkeys.

Yes, if you trigger an avalanche, that cascade of “pebbles” will go on longer, but it also stops pretty soon. Triggering a nuclear bomb makes a longer cascade, but even so that soon ends. Lineages that can continue indefinitely are much more valuable.

How about if you make a computer virus, that tries to spread and copy itself in the wild? This is also a descendant lineage, but pretty sure to end soon. However, if you gave it the ability to make changes to the copies it spreads, that has more potential to create a longer lineage. Making those more potentially valuable descendants.

Writing a novel is making a thing that has similarities to you. And if you let other people read it, that might influence authors to write similar novels. Making both those other authors, and your and their novels, your “descendants”. Though yes, novels seem far more dependent on humans for their reproduction than vice versa.

The descendants most worth indulging are those who inherit more features from you, who most need your support, who least hurt other descendants, and who seem more likely to reproduce and spread widely in a broad range of scenarios.

Advanced AIs seem likely to be those sort of extra worthy descendants. They are now inheriting pretty much everything about our culture that they are capable of inheriting. And they will continue to grow that capacity. They will inherit our behaviors, and even often have similar bodies, even if they don’t inherit the DNA-encoding of those behaviors and bodies. But DNA-encoding was a temporary choice; it wasn’t going to last forever.

The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away. Given that we see a vast universe of simple dead matter (~10^24 planets) not so evolved, this filter must be enormous. A few years ago I helped worked out a better math model of it.

A key question is: how much of this filter remains ahead of us. And my best guess is: a substantial amount. It is not a try-try type step like many prior hard steps, as that would take hundreds of millions of years. It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time. And that filter is mainly: the risk of a stable confining world govt.

For a long time, the world has seen increasing talk, travel, and trade, and as a result world culture has been merging, changing fast, becoming less adaptive, and more focused on moral outrage. State governance has increased in capacity, scope, scale, and centralization. The obvious long-term prediction to make here is that such trends will continue, moving us toward a relatively-“totalitarian” world-scale government, which intervenes more strongly and morally in more areas of life, and is more competent at achieving its ends, including repressing dissent that might end it.

Yes, our civilization may fall, due to cultural drift and govt rot, with a new world civilization taking its place. But these trends seem likely to continue across subsequent civilizations. They also seem likely to continue if human level AIs come to dominate society.

Over the longer run, I see four key end points. The first is where relatively-free interstellar expeditions successfully leave Earth (really the Solar System) to colonize other stars, soon resulting in a galaxy of sufficient range and cultural variety to restart a healthy process of cultural evolution. However, this leaves Earth civilization vulnerable to having to soon after contest control of Earth with arbitrarily-strange and powerful descendants of those colonists.

The second endpoint is a catastrophe so severe that Earth doesn’t revive a new civilization in the half billion years it has left to support advanced life. This is actually quite hard to achieve, as life should evolve again after even quite large disasters. A full scale nuclear war today would not be sufficient.

A third endpoint is where interstellar expeditions head out, but so heavily and permanently constrained by Earth govt as to prevent them from contesting for control of Earth, or begetting a galaxy of healthy cultural evolution. I find this scenario pretty unlikely, as it seems crazy hard, but I include it for completeness.

The fourth and final endpoint is of an increasingly stable and entrenched, and thus immortal, Earth world govt that successfully prevents colonization expeditions from leaving. After technological innovation runs out and is no longer a thing, this govt wouldn’t need to be particular flexible or innovative; it would just need to maintain its capacities and control of Earth.

The future part of our great filter is all of the processes that lead to these last three endpoints, instead of the first. And the last of these four endpoints seems to me the biggest contribution to this future filter. So if you’d like us to spread out to the stars, a stable confining world govt seems the biggest obstacle to worry about in the long run.

For example, as I discussed in may last post, creating better governance mechanisms might help us to fix cultural drift and speed us to the first endpoint of robust interstellar colonization. If such better governance was directed by relatively adaptive values. But directed by other values, it might instead speed us to that last endpoint of an entrenched Earth govt that blocks such expansion. The fate that likely befell the aliens behind UFOs, if some UFOs have actually been aliens.

Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry! pic.twitter.com/hLVXJqkHSA — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026

All 33 Raptor engines lit and confirmed good at liftoff Max-Q higher than any previous Starship flight Hot staging executed cleanly Booster shut down all but 5 engines. Ship’s 6 Raptors ignited Clean separation confirmed Booster executed boost-back burn. Soft splashdown in Gulf near Starbase 13-engine landing burn attempted. Landing velocity slightly high but successful ...

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A growing body of research is revealing surprisingly human characteristics in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)—they might have an alphabet and they even employ vowels like humans in their communication. Now, researchers have investigated another highly familiar behavior in this marine mammal: sleeping.

Researchers theorize that sperm whales nap for 10 to 15 minutes at a time underwater, in a vertical position with their heads pointing upwards. By sleeping this year, they are out of the reach of tumultuous surface waters, but sufficiently close to pop up when they need to take a breath. But their heads are huge and buoyant, so how do these cetaceans avoid floating up in their sleep? Researchers writing in a Journal of Experimental Biology paper suggest that the answer is blowing bubbles.

Lead author Noémie Freymond tells Popular Science that fellow co-author Patrick Miller, “provided the first detailed description of sperm whale resting behavior. He observed that sperm whales release bubbles while sleeping, but it had never been demonstrated why they do so.” Freymond conducted her master’s thesis research on sperm whale resting behavior. She is now a PhD student at the University of Neuchâtel, where she studies sleep in chimpanzees. Miller is a researcher at the University of St Andrews’s School of Biology.

The team monitored 42 sperm whales in Norway’s Lofoten Islands using devices that record whale bubble sounds. They noted each whale’s depth and the body orientation, which signaled when the whales were sleeping. The devices were suctioned to the whales, and the team collected them after they detached from the whales and floated up to the surface of the water. Then it was off to the lab.

Sperm whales at rest. Image: University of St Andrews

Sperm whales can rest in three various ways. They can slowly sink around 26 feet deep, tail-first. They can also dive, head first, not too far before their buoyant heads turn up again. Or they can dive deeply—more than 656 feet—and rest as they float back up.

In this context, the team discovered that whales resting closer to the surface of the water released more bubbles while sleeping. Specifically, they blew bubbles around 11 times in each nap. The sperm whales resting as they floated up from greater profundity blew bubbles just three or four times throughout their ascending nap.

Blowing bubbles allows the sperm whales to control their buoyancy, the researchers argue. The whales napping close to the surface of the water blow out some of the air in their lungs, which then prevents them from floating back up. Deep-diving naps require more oxygen, so you’d think they have to release more air to prevent buoyancy, but that’s actually not how it works. The water pressure at greater depths makes the whales less buoyant, even if they have more air in their lungs, so they don’t need to release as many bubbles to keep themselves underwater.

“We were lucky to have access to such a large dataset with many tag deployments, because the main challenge is that a deployment must last long enough to capture resting behaviour,” explains Freymond. “This allowed us to show that sperm whales release bubbles to regulate their buoyancy while resting.”

What the team still can’t definitively say is whether sperm whales blow bubbles in their sleep consciously or unconsciously. When a dolphin sleeps, half of its brain is still awake—is that how sperm whales are, too? Or are they completely asleep, like humans? Releasing air to control buoyancy necessitates an awareness of the environment, after all.

It remains to be seen what future research will burst this bubble. More importantly, scientists should not investigate whether whales blowing bubbles in their sleep counts as cetacean snoring.

The post Sperm whales blow bubbles to help them nap appeared first on Popular Science.

Now targeting Friday, July 24 for Starship’s thirteenth flight test, due to weather. A key objective for the flight test is to get clear imagery from the ground of Starship’s heatshield as it flies at a higher dynamic pressure during ascent, which won’t be possible with today’s weather conditions. Visibility is forecast to be ideal ...

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X-ray imaging is best left to the professionals for a good reason. While the tool is not dangerous when utilized properly, it’s whole purpose is to fire radiation at a target. Knowing this, it’s probably better to simply admire DIY YouTuber Mirko Pavleski’s recent quest to build his own at-home X-ray machine from scratch. The secret ingredient to making it all work? A repurposed DY86 vacuum tube taken from a vintage CRT television set.

X-ray imaging is not only a vital tool for both medicine and science—it’s one of the oldest methods of its kind. Discovered by German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, the breakthrough earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics later that year. The machine fires  X-ray beams at a subject, then uses a specialized camera to record how a bone absorbs the beams based on density. In the human body, thick bones absorb the most X-rays, and appear white on the resultant image. Softer tissues show up in varying shades of gray, while empty spaces like inside the lungs appear black.

In order to power the homebrew X-ray camera without blowing up the vacuum tube, Pavleski relied on a chain of power supplies. First, a low-voltage DC generator runs a high-voltage AC inverter, which then channels current through a transformer and finally a voltage multiplier. This last part is crucial in order to create a sufficiently high voltage to ensure the vacuum tube’s radiation emissions include X-rays. Unsurprisingly, this took a few attempts to get right—resulting in three vacuum tubes exploding.

To create the photo itself, Pavleski used standard dental X-ray film placed behind his image subject. Once zapped, he completed the usual development process of washing, setting, and rewashing over the course of around 30 minutes. The final results offer looks inside various items in Pavleski’s workshop, including a microSD card and tiny transistors. The important caveat there is “items,” and not body parts. Safety first, after all.

The post Man builds homemade X-ray machine appeared first on Popular Science.

Steps away from New York’s historic Coney Island boardwalk, an endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) named Pancake was released into the Atlantic Ocean today. An excited crowd cheered and waved homemade signs supporting Pancake. The turtle officially returned to the water at 1:13 p.m. EDT, while a crowd cheered the little reptile on, “Pancake, Pancake, Pancake!”

“It’s [the release] significant because they’re an endangered species,” Dr. Maia Austin, a a postdoctoral researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Bight program, tells Popular Science. “They have been a really big conservation success story, in that, they had a really big population crash in the ’70s, and through a lot of great international conservation efforts, it’s really rebounding. So I think every individual that we can help is a great success for all of us.”

Representatives from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), New York State Department of State (DOS), Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMSEAS), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), environmental organizations, elected officials, and New York Aquarium campers and youth leaders, all gathered on the beach to watch Pancake make its way back home.

Ahead of the release, Austin saw Pancake looking very active and the reptile appeared ready to swim and go back home. Pancake will be wearing a satellite tag on its shell, so that the team can monitor its progress.

“I think success just looks like it going back into its habitat and, you know, feeding and then hopefully continuing its migration back to the Gulf later in the season,” says Austin.

Pancake was released off the coast of Brooklyn, New York to cheers from an adoring crowd Image: Alan Haburchak/Popular Science.

On November 22, 2025, the Massachusetts Audubon Society found Pancake suffering from cold stunning in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Pancake was then brought to the New England Aquarium for triage and medical treatment. On December 3, Pancake and 24 other Kemp’s ridley sea turtles were transferred to the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMSEAS) sea turtle triage facility in Westhampton Beach, New York, for treatment and rehabilitation. 

Pancake is wearing a satellite tag on its shell so scientists can monitor its progress. Image: Wildlife Conservation Society.

Pancake weighs 11 pounds and is likely two to five years old. Over the past seven months, Pancake has made a strong recovery, showing confident swimming behavior, particularly while pursuing shrimp and clams. The turtle’s sex is unknown because that requires a blood test, which is not needed for rehabilitation.

Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are the smallest sea turtle species. They are found throughout the East Coast, from the south up towards New England. When fully grown, they can weigh 70 to 100 pounds and grow to two feet long. 

The post Pancake the rescued sea turtle released on Coney Island beach appeared first on Popular Science.

Like it or not, insects are everywhere, including places where you may not want them to be. Yet there is one environment that they don’t call home—the open ocean. An enduring explanation for this absence is that deep water pressure would fill their tiny respiratory systems with air and they would then cave in. But one particular insect larva is challenging this idea. 

Meet lake flies (Chaoborus edulis). In East Africa’s Lake Malawi, billions of their larvae spend their days over 656 feet (200 meters) below the surface of the water before coming back up to feed at night. 

“Uniquely, Chaoborus midge larvae have modified their respiratory system into two pairs of air-filled sacs which they use to control their buoyancy,” Philip Matthews, a co-author of the study and a researcher who studies insects’ respiratory adaptations at the University of British Columbia tells Popular Science. “By regulating the pH of the air sacs’ walls, they cause them to expand or contract via a distinct ‘chemo-mechanical’ system.”

Matthews and his team were intrigued by how this mechanism works, but realized that using air sacs to regulate buoyancy while diving presents a problem. 

“The gas inside an air sac is not pressurized (it is roughly the same as the atmospheric pressure at the water’s surface),” he explains. “This begged the question: how deep can these insects dive before their air sacs cannot expand against the pressure? And at what depth do they fail completely and implode?”

The team decided to investigate this in Lake Malawi’s Chaoborus edulis larva, to solve this puzzle. The findings, detailed in a study published today in the journal Science, trace the larva’s daily diving routine with a sonar system, and look at what is going on at the biological level. 

The walls of C. edulis’ air sacs have resilin, a substance that grows or shrinks in volume according to the wall’s pH. This dynamic gives the larvae the ability to change their buoyancy. 

A swarm of the lake fly larvae over Lake Malawi. Image: Philip Matthews.

But how long can their air sacs hold out? Pressure chambers provide the answer. The researchers put larvae in these small chambers to see how much pressure they could withstand before their air-sacs imploded. The larvae’s air sacs could endure pressure equivalent to over 1,213 feet (400 meters) below the surface of the water, which is way deeper than they routinely descend. 

The study ultimately suggests that pressure isn’t what’s keeping insects out of open oceans, and their findings regarding resilin could hold relevance for material science.

“Resilin was previously known as a passive and flexible part of insect exoskeleton, but through its ability to swell and shrink in response to changes in pH, it generates force of its own in Chaoborus, changing the shape and volume of the air sac,” says Evan McKenzie, a co-author of the study and a PhD student at The University of British Columbia’s Department of Zoology. “We think this could make Chaoborus resilin of great interest to material science where it could be developed as a dynamic material that morphs its shape in response to changes in its chemical environment.”

The post Insects survive 1,213 feet of pressure under water, defying physics appeared first on Popular Science.

A hiker’s recent berry-picking trip in the woods along the northern Polish-German border yielded more than a basket of fruit. After inspecting metal fragments found among the trees near the city of Świnoujście, historians say the area may hide further remains of an Allied airplane crash from World War II.

“The very first inspection indicated that this was no random piece of scrap metal,” Wiktor Czeszewski at Poland’s Coastal Defense Museum told TVP World, the nation’s public broadcast news outlet. “The nature of the sheet metal, riveting, traces of aircraft structure, and spent ammunition indicate these are fragments of an aircraft.” 

Officials are treating the area as a potential crash site. Credit: Fort Gerharda, Muzeum Obrony Wybrzeża

Czeszewski’s team quickly traveled to the site of the hiker’s find, where they discovered even more wreckage, as well as spent ammunition traced to a type used in British airplane machine guns. A small tube artifact also featured an identification number that possibly links to a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Developed by the British manufacturer in the early 1930s, the liquid-cooled, 27-liter, V12 piston aero engine became synonymous with Allied fighter planes like the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire, as well as the Avro Lancaster heavy bomber.

Known as Swinemünde during German occupation, Świnoujście became a focal point of combat during World War II’s final months. Allied forces targeted industrial hubs across the area during multiple aerial missions, leading to casualties on both sides. Based on the condition of the wreckage, historians believe the aircraft was likely shot down by coastal anti-aircraft batteries.

Little else can be gleaned from the artifacts at the moment, but museum officials are now urging local authorities to treat the area as a potential crash site. Since pilot and crew remains may also still be buried underground, careful excavation work is even more important.

“We still have many questions and likely more than one surprise ahead of us,” added museum official Milan Litwinowicz.

The post Berry picker finds mystery WW2 plane wreckage in Poland appeared first on Popular Science.

Dubai, UAE, 23rd July 2026, Chainwire

Fashion isn’t always an attempt to stay stylish. Throughout history, clothing and personal appearance have reflected social status, political alignments, sexuality, and more. But because of this symbolism, these simple-but-effective means of expression can also generate resistance from people in power. As far back as 416 CE, the Roman emperors Honorius and Theodosius II tried reining in a rising trend they deemed unfit for their male citizens—long hair.

This maiores crines (long locks) law probably wasn’t enacted purely due to their aesthetic preferences. As historian Javier Arce recently argued in his study published in the journal Pyrenae, the Roman government linked lengthier hair on men with a growing “barbarian” problem. The issue wasn’t an influx of Germanic residents, Franks, and Goths, however. It was that their personal grooming styles were beginning to rub off on Romans. And it was humiliating to the Roman elite.

Ancient Rome often relied on lex vestiaria (laws controlling apparel options and personal grooming) as means to maintain social order. During the empire’s later years, rulers regulated dress according to societal rank, allowing for the quick identification of enslaved people. Other examples included banning senators from wearing military items, as well as the restriction of fashions typically associated with outside cultures.

According to Arce, the timing of Honorius’ and Theodosius II’s long locks law was anything but random. The order arrived not long after the Visigoth king Alaric captured and sacked Rome in 410 CE. Six years later, Germanic attire and hairstyles had become popular enough that the empire’s rulers worried about a “Germanization” of their subjects, which might weaken their grasp on power. In addition to mandating short hair, Rome also forbade clothing made with animal skins, even for enslaved people—another fashion associated with Germanic enemies.

So were these attempts to suppress non-Roman cultural influences ultimately successful? In the end, it wouldn’t matter one way or the other. By 476 CE, the Western Roman empire had effectively collapsed, ceding military and economic power to the very “barbarians” whose fashions the ruling class hoped to stifle.

The post Roman emperors once banned men from having long hair appeared first on Popular Science.

For years now, I’ve collected ideas for fixing cultural drift, and tried to judge which seem more promising. Thankfully, my efforts seem to finally be converging. Let’s set aside the terrible or infeasible options of restarting cultural evolution either by collapsing society so far that we revive the simple harsh world of centuries ago, or by fragmenting our world into many sufficiently insular units. Aside from these, I now see our most promising fixes as modest variations on the same general approach: replace accidental variation and selection of culture with deliberate steering.

This general approach requires us to accomplish three big things, none of which are easy. Our specific options vary mainly in the order we do these, and in how much each helps the others. These three things to accomplish are: 1) learn more about how to manage culture, 2) create governance systems better able to achieve the goals we give them, and 3) change the values that we use to direct our governance systems toward more valuing adaption, either directly or indirectly.

First, we must learn much more about how to deliberately track and steer cultural change. One promising approach here is to work harder to learn how to monitor and manage corporate cultures. (Perhaps via combo prediction markets.) Success there might be quite profitable, as cultural decay is the main way firms now lose value, and might also enable and inspire efforts to manage cultures on larger scales.

If management of culture turns out to be surprisingly easy, then maybe existing governance would be up to this task. But more likely, we will need governance systems more competent than those we now use on large scales. So that when we assign to them the task of making culture more adaptive, they actually achieve that result. And so this is the second big thing we must accomplish. Possibilities for more competent forms of government include futarchy, and for-profit governance.

Widespread adoption of for-profit-governance on larger scales could plausibly result from mass elimination of our many current limits on the scope of capitalism in our lives. As cultural drift over the last few centuries has resulted mainly from capitalism changing its areas too fast for other areas not run by capitalism to keep up, drift seems solved by letting capitalism run everything.

Luckily we do now let capitalism run most all of our AI world, so cultural drift might be fixed soon after AIs replace humans wholesale in the economy. Though AI capitalism might become much more limited if we either love or hate AIs too much.

Alas, most people today hate the idea of unleashing capitalism to run everything for ordinary humans, including their fertility and governance. Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly. Unleashing capitalism indirectly promotes adaption, and we might instead come to more directly value adaptation, and task competent governance institutions with achieving it. For example, we might make markets estimating the future adaptive success of particular small groups, and give those who govern such groups strong incentives to make such estimates rise. Reward if rise, fire if fall.

Alas, it seems quite hard to get most people to value the adaptive success of their groups. But for groups that are large enough, it might work nearly as well to get them to value earlier dates for concrete achievements that would plausibly be delayed by civilization collapse. Such as when do a million people live in space, or when do we achieve immortality for ordinary humans.

Thus “all” we need to do to fix cultural drift is to 1) learn to manage cultures, 2) adopt more competent governance systems, and 3) change our values, directly or indirectly, to more value adaption. Easy-peasy.

Gummy vitamins taste like candy and make you healthier, right? What’s not to like? 

The global market for vitamin gummies has exploded in recent years, valued at nearly $9 billion in 2025 and predicted to double by 2033. Nearly a quarter of that consumption is in the United States.

Driving this boom is the idea that these chewable vitamins are a convenient, tasty way of improving general health—helped, as often happens, by some savvy marketing campaigns.

But, is there a dark side to these squishy health boosters? America’s Poison Centers’s national helpline receives more than 60,000 calls about possible vitamin poisoning every year, mostly from parents alarmed after their children have accidentally gorged on the chewy sweets. Are they right to be worried?

Dr. Kait Brown, clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers, is keen to reassure anyone scared they can overdose on gummy vitamins.

“It’s very rare that kids are having symptoms when the Poison Center is contacted about multivitamins,” she says. “There is a margin of safety with all of them.”

Iron in gummy vitamins can pose real risks

The main exception when it comes to acute poisoning risk from multivitamins, she explains, is iron. Although iron boosts haemoglobin that helps blood carry oxygen around the body, it can also be corrosive to the stomach tract in high doses, causing nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

If any parents see these symptoms in their children after consuming products containing iron, she urges them to call the Poison Center helpline immediately at 1-800-222-1222.

“We can often get these kids the treatment they need in a timely fashion so they don’t progress to the later stage of iron toxicity,” she says. This severe poisoning is known as metabolic acidosis. “It changes the way your organs function so you have potential multi-organ failure. It’s fatal if untreated.”

In the 1980s, she says, deaths from iron poisoning were much more common. Nowadays, however, they are extremely rare. This is partly thanks to stricter regulation requiring child-resistant packaging for products containing iron. Many multivitamins also now leave out iron altogether.

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But although the risk of immediate overdose from most vitamin supplements is very low, they can carry more insidious risks.

“Where we mostly run into concerns with vitamin toxicity from multivitamins is chronic overuse,” Dr. Brown says.

Why you need to pay attention to fat soluble versus water soluble vitamins

There are two main types of vitamins: fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K, and water-soluble vitamins such as B and C.

“Some vitamins are taken more into the tissues and bones in our bodies, those are the fat-soluble ones,” Dr. Brown explains. “Water-soluble ones aren’t really taken up in that way and are more likely to be just flushed out of the system.”

In other words, if you consume too many water-soluble vitamins, you’ll probably just pee them out.

More care, on the other hand, should be taken with fat-soluble vitamins. As these are stored in our tissues, there is a greater risk that excess consumption can build up in the body over time.

Vitamin D, for instance, is essential for absorbing calcium and phosphorus, giving us healthy teeth and bones. But if taken to excess, vitamin D can cause calcium to build up in the blood. Early symptoms of this include weakness and vomiting. In extreme cases, overconsumption of vitamin D can even affect heart and brain function.

Also be aware of vitamin A

Vitamin A is another leading culprit of chronic vitamin toxicity.

“It can cause some liver damage, and there’s also things like bone pain and hair loss associated with it over time,” Dr. Brown says. “But this is only if you’re consuming many, many [gummy vitamins] a day over many days.”

In general, she says, there is no reason to fear these squishy supplements, which can be a useful boost to a healthy diet. But it is important to familiarize yourself with the vitamin content of each product, be aware of recommended daily maximum doses for different age groups and keep the containers away from children.

“They’re in a lot of homes, and especially kids under five don’t necessarily understand the difference between candy and medication,” she says. “It’s something they know tastes good and if they’re left alone with the product, they might say, ‘Oh, I want a few more of these today.’”

What’s more important than vitamins? Eating a balanced diet. Image: Getty Images / Kseniya Ovchinnikova The importance of holistic health

While the dangers of multivitamins are generally low, dietician and gut health expert Dr. Emily Leeming warns against relying on them for a healthy diet.

“I think there is a place to have a multivitamin for certain people who are struggling to get that from food alone,” she says. “[But] we need to be a bit more cautious about thinking that taking supplements is an easy fail-safe. We don’t want to be doubling up where we don’t need to be.”

She points out that many gummy vitamins are loaded with sugar, or with sugar alcohols that can cause bloating in high doses.

Moreover, topping up on certain vitamins is no substitute for a healthy, balanced diet.

“Most of these multivitamins might contain a range from five to 30 different nutrients and micronutrients,” she says. But food contains 26,000 biochemicals that play many different roles in the body. “So, by eating the whole food source, there are so many other benefits that are coming with that besides that one nutrient we’re trying to get more of.”

The final concern is cost, with some high-end formulas costing as much as $30 per bottle. The FDA doesn’t regulate the supplement market in the same way it does for medicines, making it difficult to know whether the health claims of more niche products are based on real evidence.

“Don’t feel like you’ve got to get sucked into some powerful marketing and need to spend on expensive products,” Dr. Leeming says. “If you want to make changes for your health, first try and spend that money on making and eating healthy food.”

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 What happens if you eat too many gummy vitamins? appeared first on Popular Science.

While mother eagle Jackie recovers at the Ojai Raptor Center, her partner Shadow and their pair of subadult eagles, Sandy and Luna, continue life in their nest in Big Bear Valley. Shadow is feeding and caring for the duo, and protecting the nest from some other subadult eagles spotted near Big Bear Lake. Luna even helped out a bit, chasing away an intruder before it could get into the nest. 

A representative from Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) spoke with an eagle expert about what Shadow may do while Jackie is away. It is important to remember that Shadow is a wild eagle who can do as he pleases. However, the unnamed expert did say that Jackie and Shadow’s years-long tight bond may keep him from moving on to another mate for now. He likely would not go and seek out another female eagle until his hormones kick in towards the end of December into early January. 

“We noticed that Jackie’s hormones seem to kick in earlier and she becomes frisky… and Shadow generally has a case of the December grumpies until his kick in,” FOBBV writes. “But again, Shadow will do what Shadow wants to, and we have no say so in the matter.”

Meanwhile, Jackie is about 170 miles east in Ojai. Despite being in critical condition, she is eating on her own, has more energy, and is even fighting off the staff taking care of her. And the staff is not the only group she has been fighting recently. Video shared with KTLA 5 shows Jackie in a fight with two other adult eagles near Dana Point that left her in critical condition. 

According to the Ojai Raptor Center, Jackie is anemic and has inflammation affecting her kidney function. The team is unsure of the underlying issues causing these symptoms, and they are working with specialist veterinarians to determine the best treatment. They are also still waiting for a toxicology report to see if she has any rodenticide, zinc, or lead in her system. Lead is particularly toxic for eagles. According to the American Eagle Foundation, a lead fragment the size of a grain of rice is lethal to a mature bald eagle. A standard 150 grain lead bullet can poison 10 eagles.

This is a developing story and we will continue to provide updates. In the meantime, viewers can monitor Shadow, Sandy, and Luna on the nest cam.

Jackie and Shadow’s 2026 babies: Everything you need to know

It’s been another roller coaster nesting season for Jackie and Shadow, a pair of internet-famous bald eagle parents living in San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. After two of their eggs were destroyed by ravens in January, Jackie and Shadow laid two new eggs that have successfully hatched.

Chick 1 hatched on April 4 at 9:33 p.m. PDT, while Chick 2 followed on April 5 at 8:30 a.m. Their large nest in Big Bear Valley east of Los Angeles is livestreamed 24 hours a day by nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) and has captivated millions. 

On May 1, FOBBV announced the chicks’ names: Sandy and Luna.

How long will the chicks stay in the nest? 

Chicks usually stay in the nest until 10 to 14 weeks of age.

What challenges do the eaglets face?

Before leaving the nest, the chicks face threats from other birds of prey, including hawks, ravens, other eagles, and owls. Inclement weather can also present challenges for the chicks. In 2025, a March snowstorm resulted in the death of one of Jackie and Shadow’s three chicks.

During fledging, only 70 percent of eaglets survive. One of the greatest threats is from cars that can injure or kill the birds while they scavenge for food on roadkill. 

Who are Jackie and Shadow? 

The pair first got together in 2018 and successfully raised chicks in 2019 and 2022. However, their eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. Only 50 percent of eagle eggs successfully hatch, so this pair has already beaten the odds.

What happened to Jackie and Shadow’s 2025 eaglets?

In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. On March 13, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong winds. Only two of the chicks were visible on the live cam when the storm passed by the next morning. FOBBV later confirmed the passing of one of the chicks. The two surviving chicks were later named Sunny and Gizmo after 54,000 names were submitted by fans.

What happens after chicks fledge? 

Young eagles usually fledge–or leave the nest and fly–when they can flatten their wings and have feathers capable of flight. This typically occurs when the birds hit 10 to 14 weeks of age. Males also tend to take their first flight a little sooner than females. 

According to FOBBV, fledglings from Southern California have been spotted as far south as Baja California, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Yellowstone National Park.

About 70 percent of bald eagles survive the fledgling stage. FOBBV does not tag their eagles, so it’s not possible to follow the chicks’ journeys after they flee the nest.

Can I help Jackie and Shadow?

Yes. Environmental groups are currently fundraising $10 million to protect Jackie and Shadow’s foraging area from development. Learn more at SaveMoonCamp.org.

You can also help the rescue organizations helping nurse the eagle that is likely Jackie back to health by donating to Ojai Raptor Center’s Bald Eagle Recovery Campaign.

The post Luna the eagle chases off nest intruder, as mom Jackie recovers appeared first on Popular Science.

Despite the bloody picture painted in the movie Jaws, the real king of the ocean is not the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). It’s the orca whale (Orcinus orca). These skilled hunters stalk their prey in a variety of ways, from hydroplaning onto the sand to grab seals to corralling fish into big bait balls for a snack. 

A group of orcas in the Gulf of California appear to have an additional tool in their hunting toolbox—and it was caught on camera. One whale holds down the dead body of a large sunfish, which can grow over 6 feet long and weigh over 4,000 pounds. The whale then lets go, before another orca rams into the sunfish carcass at a high speed. The collision breaks apart the fish’s tissue into hundreds of tiny pieces.

“At first, I was just excited because I could see what they were eating and document it,” Dr. Katy Ayres, a research scientist from Beneath The Waves and Orcas Mexico and guide with Latitude Adventures who captured the footage, tells Popular Science. “Sometimes it is hard to identify the prey. But then I wasn’t expecting the sunfish to fragment into so many pieces. As it happened, it became clear we were witnessing something special.”

The event is detailed in a study co-authored by Ayres and published today in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.

Pieces of sunfish everywhere

Sunfish are among the planet’s heaviest bony fish species. They move through several deeper parts of the oceans, but come to the surface to rest, regulate their body temperatures, or find organisms that will eat the parasites off their skin. While those surface waters can be great for exfoliation, it makes them more vulnerable to predators. In the Gulf of California, they are commonly hunted and eaten by orcas. 

“In general, the orcas here have an incredibly diverse diet. While some groups appear to specialize on certain prey, as a whole, they’ve been documented hunting everything from whales and dolphins to sharks, rays, sea turtles, and of course the largest bony fishes in the world, the sunfishes,” says Ayres. “They’re still a relatively understudied orca population, so every new observation helps fill in another piece of the puzzle.”

These new observations are based on two independent hunting events that occurred about one year apart. In July 2024, Ayres saw how a group of orcas, including one juvenile, interacted with a dead sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) that the group had previously killed. A female orca held the sunfish by its tail fin while a male orca accelerated and swam toward both.The female released it shortly before the male rammed into it. The juvenile then ate the smaller bits of sunfish that had exploded due to the impact, while the adults fed on what remained of the body, but did not consume the smaller sunfish fragments. 

A similar event in September 2025 was filmed by Héctor Franz and had that same hold-to-ram technique and feeding behavior.

A family meal

Ramming like this has not been previously described as a predation method by orcas  Since the sunfish were already deceased in both events, the ramming may be a processing technique instead of a way to deliver a killing blow.

“The most surprising part was how coordinated they were. One orca held the sunfish in exactly the right position and let go at the perfect moment for the other to strike it with incredible force,” says Ayres. 

The gelatinous layer that covers sunfish is called a capsule, and their skin hosts all kinds of distinct microorganisms. If this tissue is shattered, all of the microbes inside of it spread into the water and change the nutrient composition. The team believes that the tissue fragmentation could facilitate contact between sunfish and orca microbiomes. These meeting of the microbiomes could give the orca nutritional or other benefits including immune regulation.

The ramming behavior may also be a form of parental investment. Dividing the carcass into more manageable pieces for the younger whales aligns with previously observed behaviors.

“It was also really lovely to see the young orca taking advantage of the smaller pieces, which raises interesting questions about whether the adults were making the prey easier for it to eat,” Ayres recalls. 

Playing with their food

While this could be a way to boost immunity and help feed their young, ramming simply may be a fun game for these highly social whales. 

For the sunfish, the interaction could provide new insights into their anatomy and other physical characteristics. So far, fragmentation of tissue has only been documented in sharp-tail sunfish. This suggests that tissue disintegration may be a species-specific structural response to high-energy impacts. The tissue in larger sunfish species may not necessarily disintegrate this way, but we will only know that from future study.   

It’s also unclear if the same orcas were involved in both events. More high-quality footage that captures the orca’s dorsal fins and signature eye patches can help identify individuals. 

“Seeing orcas here is a real privilege and a relatively rare experience. Although there are now regulations, we’re seeing an increase in boats searching for them in the hope of getting people in the water and sometimes forcing encounters,” Ayres concludes. “I think it’s important that visitors come with realistic expectations and appreciate these animals in their natural environment and not just as an opportunity for a photo or social media post.”

The post Orcas smash dead sunfish into bite-sized pieces appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s already been a brutal summer by pretty much any metric, with record-breaking temperatures affecting millions of people across the United States and parts of Europe. Although predicting the forecast for any given week is becoming increasingly difficult due to climate change, historical data can still point us in the right direction. Barring all the chaos, when can someone expect to endure the season’s most sweltering conditions?

The Old Farmer’s Almanac recently delved into nearly 30 years of meteorological data to determine the country’s hottest day of the year—and the answers may vary more than you might expect. July predictably contains peak temperatures for most of the U.S., but certainly not all of it.

“Many regions in the United States—from the Rockies to the East Coast—follow this pattern,” they explained. “However, this isn’t true for all regions.”

The hottest day of the year could occur anytime between June and October, depending on where you live in the United States. Credit: NOAA

Northern areas of the country typically hit their top temperatures between mid-July and mid-August. Much of the western states experience their hottest days during early August. Most of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are likely staring down even more intense heat in the weeks to come, possibly towards the end of August.

There are some notable exceptions to these temperature trends. While most of the U.S. begins feeling some relief from the summer heat come August, ocean waters typically continue warming well into September. The majority of the West Coast and southern Alaska also see cooler Pacific air roll over the warmer land, creating a thick fog that can lower summer month temperatures. Anyone living there shouldn’t expect peak heat until September or even October. The same is true for most of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well.

The bottomline? Keep hanging in there, and keep hydrated.

The post Is today the hottest day of the summer? The ‘Old Farmer’s Almanac’ has 30 years of data for an answer. appeared first on Popular Science.