DOUBLE JEOPARDY = Damned if you Do or Don't!!

TRG-035: Because Dentures Are So Last Century! Imagine a world where losing a tooth does not doom you to a lifetime of awkward smiles, crunchy corn avoidance, or nightly prayers to the Tooth Fairy for an inflation-adjusted payout.  That future just edged closer: a Japanese research team launched the world’s first human clinical trials of TRG-035 , a drug designed to regrow human teeth by blocking a protein called USAG-1 , which normally tells budding teeth to “keep calm and stay dormant.” If you’ve been following the saga of regenerative dentistry from the periphery (or the ugliest nook of TikTok), here’s the non-sci-fi summary.  USAG-1 is one of those biochemical hall monitors that prevents extra teeth from forming once your pearly set is supposedly complete.  In lab animals — namely mice and ferrets — researchers found that blocking USAG-1 reactivated dormant tooth-forming stem cells, which then set about building fully functional teeth. Which is, objectively, both asto...

For decades, Buford Pusser was a walking, talking piece of Americana: a one-man anti-corruption reel who carried a stick, cleaned up McNairy County, and inspired a 1973 movie called Walking Tall (and yes, a 2004 remake — because Hollywood likes recycling gravelly stares).  The movie narrative was tidy: the sheriff’s wife is killed in an ambush, he survives, and vengeance + stick ensues as he battles crime. The story begins with a horrible tragedy and ends with justice served! Except new reporting from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, summarized by District Attorney Mark Davidson, suggests the script may have included a few uncredited plot twists — and not the kind with cinematographer cut-scenes and synth music... Davidson said the TBI recently uncovered “inconsistencies with Pusser’s statements and other evidentiary inconsistencies” surrounding the 1967 death of Pauline Mullins Pusser.  He added that those inconsistencies would have “more likely than not” been used t...

If you’re the sort of person who used to think owning a utility was about steady cash and tasteful maintenance of transformers, welcome to 2025 — when utilities have become the private-equity equivalent of beachfront condos .  In one corner, BlackRock (via Global Infrastructure Partners, or GIP) and CPP Investments are reportedly circling Allete — the parent of Duluth’s Minnesota Power — with a roughly $6.2 billion checkbook.  In the other, Blackstone has announced plans to acquire TXNM Energy (the parent of PNM and TNMP) for $11.5 billion, a deal that would hand them sway over utilities serving some 800,000 customers across New Mexico and Texas. If that sounds like two hedge-fund-themed romcom storylines colliding — “Love Actually, But With Grid Infrastructure” — the plot thickens when regulators and judges show up like reluctant parents. “Not in my backyard” meets “Not in my ratepayer bill” The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is now the gatekeeper.  An adm...

If you’ve been blaming Monday for being especially long and Thursday for slipping away like a greased weasel, NASA says you might be onto something — but not in the way you think.  It turns out our species’ appetite for monument-making and “big solves” may have consequences so tiny they make a nanosecond look like a spectacle, and yet oddly poetic: mega-projects such as China’s Three Gorges Dam can measurably nudge the planet’s spin. Yes, the same humans who can’t agree on a universal charging cable have engineered structures large enough to be felt — by very sensitive instruments — in the graceful, millennia-old wobble of planet Earth.  The Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, fills a reservoir holding roughly 10.6 trillion gallons of water.  According to NASA scientists, when that amount of mass shifts location, the planet responds the way an ice skater responds when they tuck in their arms: the spin changes, ever so slightly. H...

Welcome to 2025: where your phone, your streaming service, your toothbrush, and now — apparently — your car’s muscles come with recurring fees.  First they tried the remote start subscription and it somewhat failed after outrage from consumers. Now they're selling subscriptions for Horsepower!!! Volkswagen quietly added a new twist to the subscription economy with the ID.3 Series.  The base ID.3 Pro and ID.3 Pro S both ship with 201 bhp, but pay an ongoing subscription and voilà — the car apparently “remembers” it has 228 bhp and more torque!  In short: horsepower, once the unmistakable language of torque and swagger, is starting to speak the language of monthly billing cycles. Volkswagen pitches this as flexibility...Yeah; Right! Don’t want to pay for a higher trim up front? Fine!  Only pay for the 'oomph' when you need it — say, for a mountain weekend or beating the neighbor’s new EV off the line — then cancel when you return to town.  But consumer crit...

Imagine a world where whether you sit in jail before trial depends on your flight risk, not your wallet. Radical, right?  That is the basic idea behind cashless bail — a pretrial reform that releases defendants without paying money, relying instead on a promise to appear and, sometimes, on electronic monitoring or mandatory check-ins.  Its goal is simple: stop wealth from being the deciding factor in who waits for trial behind bars. And yet, less than two decades after the modern bail outrage went mainstream, the policy has become Washington reality.  On August 25, 2025 , President Donald Trump signed executive orders aimed at ending cashless bail — threatening to withhold federal funding from jurisdictions that continued the practice.  Cue the gasps, the op-eds, the (predictable) parade of scare headlines. Welcome to the Bailbox: Where Justice, Policy and Political power collide. How cashless bail actually works (not as dramatic as the headlines) Under cashless ba...

Truth, in its raw form, is abrasive. It scrapes off the comforting varnish we’ve lacquered onto our assumptions, revealing the knotted wood beneath.  It points out hypocrisy, punctures self-importance, and rearranges the neat little furniture of our beliefs.  No wonder most humans flinch. When someone holds up a mirror that shows us as we are, not as we like to be, the knee-jerk reaction is defensive posture, not gratitude.  Pride says, “How dare you!” Ego musters the weapons — outrage, denial, ad hominem — and the conversation turns into combat. “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”  That pithy line — often attributed to  George Bernard Shaw  — is less a standup zinger and more a survival manual for anyone who’s ever wanted to say something true and not immediately end up unpopular at Thanksgiving. Enter humor: the Trojan horse of truth.  A joke arrives with a wink and a rubber chicken, not a subpoena....

Here's the situation: you’re about to send your Aunt Gisele a plush hedgehog and a bottle of French jam for her birthday, and suddenly the post office looks at you like you just handed over a live grenade!  Welcome to the age of the Parcel Panic — where the tiny print on international shipping rules is wrecking small e-commerce dreams and prompting continental postal services to press the big red “hold” on parcels bound for U.S. customers. Here’s what happened: the U.S. “de minimis” exemption — the blessed rule that let packages under $800 enter the country duty-free — is due to expire .  In 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection counted some 1.36 billion parcels under that rule, totaling roughly $64.6 billion.  That’s a lot of wish-lists and impulse buys.  With a new trade framework setting a 15% tariff on most goods shipped from the EU — yes, even on packages worth less than $800 — postal operators across Europe blinked, shrugged, and said: “We’re not ready...

If the courthouse were a theater, last year’s script in Letcher County, Ky., might have started as a sleepy one-act about routine docket calls and ended up as a fatalist noir where the lead actor never gets to bow.  The late Judge Kevin Mullins — shot to death in his chambers in September 2024 — is now at the center of allegations that read like a legal-thriller outline, except the plot twists involve real people and very real pain. The latest chorus of claims, coming from several women including allegations by a woman identified as Tya Adams, suggest something darker than a mere abuse of discretion: allegations that sexual favors were traded for lighter sentences and, perhaps, other forms of influence.  Adams told investigators and reporters, “ I was part of it. I was one of them, ” and said Mullins made her feel “ small and degraded ” — phrases that cut through the euphemisms courts often favor.  According to a NewsNation report, Adams also claimed Mullins had sex with...

Imagine turning 75 years-old and deciding the perfect birthday present to yourself is a little quality time with your vintage Cessna 4-seater small plane..... That is, until the Cessna decides it has other plans — like a multi-stop joyride across Southern California with no itinerary and even fewer apologies!! Jason Hong calls his 1958 Cessna Skyhawk his “old treasure.”  But lately that treasure has been vanishing like socks from a dryer! Hong arrived at California's Corona Municipal Airport hangar where his plane usually naps and was, understandably, baffled. “I got confused,” he said. “I thought, ‘Did I park it somewhere else? Did the airport manager move it?’ But I looked all over.” Turns out, the plane had been relocated — not by the airport manager, not by the FAA, and not by any polite note left on a windshield... It showed up at California's Brackett Field Airport, about 23 miles from Corona!  Hong found cigarette butts and trash in the cockpit and, being the sort of...

So Why Isn’t This a Bigger Story? Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, announced in a televised address that he will “activate a special plan with more than 4.5 million militiamen to ensure coverage of the entire national territory – militias that are prepared, activated and armed.”  It was the kind of line that reads like a Cold War flashback: mass mobilization, rhetoric about sovereignty, and a clear message to a foreign audience.  The timing was blunt: Washington had just doubled the bounty for Maduro’s arrest to $50 million and deployed three guided-missile destroyers — the USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham and USS Sampson — to the southern Caribbean as part of expanded anti-drug operations. Yet if your social feed featured more celebrity squabbles than analysis of what looks like a serious escalation in Venezuela, you’re not alone.  That dissonance is part of the problem: powerful moves and risky rhetoric, and relatively muted global discussion.  So let’s unpack...