Former pro wrestler says he is happy working at Walmart

Former WWE wrestler Jon Heidenreich says he is very happy with the life he’s living 20 years removed from his TV run. A few months back, a photo went viral on social media showing Heidenreich working at a Walmart in New Orleans. The picture was shared by a co-worker who was excited to learn that Heidenreich was once a wrestling champion. This has led to Heidenreich taking bookings for appearances and signings again, along with getting booked for an interview on Insight with Chris Van Vliet. Heidenreich said the co-worker who posted the picture was actually from Walmart’s renovation team that travels around. When Heidenreich learned he was from Ohio, he asked if the man had ever heard of Ohio Valley Wrestling. They started talking about wrestling and the co-worker ordered an old Heidenreich action figure for him to sign. Heidenreich, 56, explained that his job at Walmart is working overnights putting out freight. He likes his job and couldn’t ask for a better life than he’s lived. (via f4wonline)

They blasted soil with gamma rays but it continued to emit CO2 for six years

Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop. They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing. Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil. Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide for six years. (via Quanta)

He walked from NYC to San Francisco and memorized all 12 books of Paradise Lost

John Basinger, an actor and college professor widely believed to be the only person ever to have memorized all 12 books of John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” — a feat he turned into a one-man show that inspired research into the workings of memory — died on May 29 in Brookings, S.D. He was 92. His death was from complications of pneumonia, his wife, the film historian Jeanine Basinger, said. Throughout his life, Mr. Basinger devoted himself to pursuits that some would have dismissed as fanciful. As a young man, he walked from New York to San Francisco. He moved to Kenya on a whim, becoming fluent in Swahili after spending five years teaching at a rural school for boys. Perhaps most improbably, he became a musician for the National Theater of the Deaf. He was not deaf, but he mastered sign language and spent decades performing with, writing for and helping run the troupe. He also taught theater, speech and sign language in Norwich, Conn., at Mohegan Community College. (via the New York Times)

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

Researchers in Japan are doing clinical trials of a drug that could regrow teeth

Researchers at Kyoto University Hospital have begun the first human trial of TRG-035, a drug meant to grow new teeth in people who are missing them. Humans keep a set of dormant tooth buds left over after the adult teeth come in, but a protein holds them switched off for life. The drug blocks that protein, which the researchers call "the body's molecular off-switch for tooth development." Thirty adult men, each short a tooth, have enrolled in the study. The discovery came from a genetic accident. Mice bred without the gene for that protein sprouted teeth they were never supposed to have. One shot of the antibody later produced working teeth in mice and ferrets, with no serious safety problems. The first round, which began in late 2024 and was tracked for 11 months, tests only whether the drug is safe in people. If the drug clears the safety stage, the next round will treat children aged 2 to 7 who were born without teeth. (via Boing Boing)

They tried to swap airplanes by jumping out while flying them but the FAA was not happy

In April 2022, two cousins, Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington, decided to do something that no one had ever done before — and for good reason, because it’s colossally difficult and probably stupid, too. They each decided to take a single-person plane skyward at the same time, and then switch planes — in midair. Aikins and Farrington, in their defense, were professional daredevils — both were longtime pilots and skydivers. Farrington had logged more than 27,000 jumps and 6,000 hours as a pilot before this stunt; Aikins had already made a name for himself in 2016 when he set a world record by freefalling from 25,000 feet without a parachute. But what they did over Eloy, Arizona on April 24 of that year was something no one else had ever attempted. The idea was for each pilot to fly his own Cessna 182 to an altitude of 14,000 feet, pitch both planes into a synchronized nosedive, stop the engines, and then jump out. (via Now I Know)

Is this a video of a very small man or a very big truck or both?

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com