The Magazine

What’s the connection between caffeine, the finish line, and marathon deaths? An investigation of how much caffeine is too much for runners, and the explosion of caffeine-related products handed out at races:

Starting three years ago, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association (IMMDA) has warned runners to ingest no more than 200 mg of caffeine before and during a race, based on research that has shown that during exercise, caffeine affects the heart in ways that can send someone into cardiac arrest. “Every incident is disturbing,” says Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, chairman of the board of governors for the IMMDA and medical director of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training. There was no single incident that led the group to put out the warning in 2010, but it stemmed from a “constant conversation on how to be safer.”

So far this year, four cardiac-related causalities have fit the pattern: Alain Rettig, 45, in the TCS Amsterdam Marathon, 1 km from the finish line; Ricki Savage, 27, in the Dublin Marathon at the finish line; Jake Zeman, 35, in the Rock ’n’ Roll Savannah Marathon, feet from the finish line; and Kyle Chase Johnson, 23, in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon, less than a mile from the finish line.

What will it look like when drones (like those envisioned by Amazon’s Prime Air) come to U.S. airspace?

In this property-rights-obsessed nation, it turns out you actually don’t have a clear right to shoot down a drone hovering low over your backyard unless it’s putting you in imminent physical danger.

“You have to acknowledge in this day and age that stuff flies over your house,” Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in robotics and the law, told me. That puts him at odds with conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who voiced a more typical reaction on Fox News last year: “The first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”