Regrowing Teeth Might Not Be Science Fiction Anymore

The human body is remarkably good at handling repairs. Cut the skin, and the blood will clot over the wound and the healing process begins. Break a bone, and the body will knit it back together as long as you keep it still enough. But teeth? Our adult teeth get damaged all the time, and yet the body has almost no way to repair them at all. Get a bad enough cavity or knock one out, and it’s game over. There’s nothing to be done but replace it.

Finding a way to repair teeth without invasive procedures has long been a holy grail for dental science. A new treatment being developed in Japan could help replace missing teeth in the near future.

The Tooth

Using an antibody treatment to suppress USAG-1 in ferrets led to the development of supernumerary teeth. In regular speak, that means “more teeth than you would typically expect a ferret to have.” Credit: Research paper
In the course of normal development, humans grow a set of baby teeth, followed by a set of adult or “permanent” teeth. Conventional wisdom tells us that this second set is all we get, and that we should properly care for them if we hope to hang on to them for life. Physical injury can knock them out, and a lack of dental hygiene can see them badly damaged to the point where they have to be removed. Thus, there are plenty of incentives to take care of one’s teeth, given that there is little to be done beyond replacing them with clumsy dentures if they fail us.

Researchers in Japan may have figured out a workaround, however. A gene called uterine sensitization–associated gene-1 (USAG-1) was identified to play a role in stopping the growth of teeth in small mammals like mice and ferrets. In turn, it was determined that by inhibiting the interaction between proteins generated by USAG-1 and bone morphgenetic protein (BMP) molecules, it was possible to make dental growth resume. The perceived link is relatively simple—suppress USAG-1, and kickstart the tooth generation process. The hope is that using an antibody to do this would then lead to the spontaneous development of healthy adult teeth.

Research suggests that humans may have an extra set of teeth “buds” lurking in the jaw that normally lay dormant; it could be as simple as activating them to produce new teeth as needed. Thus, the concept is sometimes referred to as growing “the third tooth”—in that a regenerated tooth would be the third tooth after the original baby and adult teeth. Particularly as human lifespans grow longer, the ability to produce a third set of teeth becomes more valuable. However, the technique won’t just be useful for people that break a tooth or lose one to excessive acid wear or associated damage. Indeed, an early focus of the work is to help individuals with conditions like congenital anodontia, wherein a patient never grew a full set of mature permanent teeth. The aim is that the treatment could stimulate the growth of strong, adult-grade teeth to improve the quality of life for those with the condition.
It’s believed humans may have buds for a third set of teeth already lurking, just waiting to be activated. Credit: research paper
With early stage trials in mice completed some time ago, the treatment remains in early stage clinical trials for humans. An initial trial tested the treatment on adult males from 30 to 64 years old who were missing at least one tooth. This was with the hope that if growth did occur, it would ideally be limited to the missing slot, rather than causing new growth in areas that would push out existing healthy teeth. The next stage of trials will involve young children from ages 2 to 7 who are missing at least four teeth, to test the treatment on those with a congenital tooth deficiency. It’s likely that testing will also aim to determine just how USAG-1 suppression influences tooth regrowth. Ideally, it would only occur in specific areas where teeth were missing. It would be a great disaster if the treatment led to widespread tooth regrowth, which could cause crowding issues or loss of healthy teeth.

Right now, taking a pill or injection to regrow entire teeth seems like science fiction. However, if it does turn out that merely supressing some proteins is enough to get the body’s own tooth factory rolling again, it could be a game changer. There’s hope yet for all, except perhaps those that make their business in selling dentures.

hackaday.com/2026/01/27/regrow…

Running DOOM on Earbuds

In 1993, DOOM was a great game to play if you had a 486 with a VGA monitor and nothing to do all weekend. In 2026, you can play it on a set of earbuds instead, if for some reason that’s something you’ve always dreamed of doing.

The project comes to us from [Arin Sarkisian], who figured out that the Pinebuds Pro had enough processing power to run one of the seminal FPS games from the 1990s. Inside these earbuds is a Cortex-M4F, which is set to run at 100 MHz. [Arin] figured out it could easily be cranked up to 300 MHz with low power mode switched off, which would come in handy for one main reason. See, the earbuds might be able to run the DOOM engine, but they don’t have a display.

Thus, [Arin] figured the easiest way to get the video data out would be via the Cortex-M4F’s serial UART running at 2.4 mbps. Running the game at a resolution of 320 x 200 at 3 frames per second would consume this entire bandwidth. However, all those extra clock cycles allow running an MJPEG compression algorithm that allow spitting out up to 18 frames per second. Much better!

All that was left to do was to figure out a control scheme. To that end, a web server is set up off-board that passes key presses to the buds and accepts and displays the MJPEG stream to the player. If you’re so inclined you can even play the game yourself on the project website, though you might just have to get in a queue. In the meantime, you can watch the Twitch stream of whoever else is playing at the time.

Files are on GitHub—both the earbud firmware and the web interface used to play the game. It was perhaps only a matter of time until we saw DOOM on earbuds; no surprise given that we’ve already seen it played on everything from receipt printers to cookware. No matter how cliche, we’re going to keep publishing interesting DOOM ports—so keep them coming to the tipsline.

Thanks to [alialiali] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/01/27/runnin…

Zombie Netscape Won’t Die

The very concept of the web browser began with a humble piece of software called NCSA Mosaic, all the way back in 1993. It was soon eclipsed by Netscape Navigator, and later Internet Explorer, which became the titans of the 1990s browser market. In turn, they too would falter. Navigator’s dying corpse ended up feeding what would become Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer later morphed into the unexceptional browser known as Edge.

Few of us have had any reason to think about Netscape Navigator since its demise in 2008. And yet, the name lingers on. A zombie from a forgotten age, risen again to haunt us today.

The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

Netscape Navigator was once the browser to use, dominating its rivals with a 90% market share. Unfortunately, that reign of glory only lasted until the last few years of the 1990s, when Internet Explorer began to embrace, extend, and extinguish. Explorer was included with every copy of Windows sold, it was distributed by AOL and minor ISPs alike, and it was better at keeping up with, or outright creating, new standards at a time when Netscape’s developers became stuck in the quagmire of an an increasingly aging codebase.

Netscape was great right through the 4.0s, but Netscape 5 was cancelled, and Netscape 6 was a mess. The company was bought out by AOL, and the product limped on into the early 2000s, but it was eventually declared dead on March 1, 2008. With almost no user base to speak of at that point, it simply did not make sense to continue.

You might think, then, that the Netscape name died with the browser and that it would never be seen or heard again. Unfortunately, that’s almost never the case when it comes to recognizable names in the tech world. Somebody always seems to hang on to the rights to do something with them, even if it’s usually unsuccessful. Sometimes it goes well, but more often than not, it amounts to little more than a hackneyed old logo slapped on a product that nobody really cares about.
Connect to the Internet by dialing up the Netscape ISP! Ironically founded several years after the browser ceased to be relevant at all. Credit: Netscape ISP via Web Archive
In the case of Netscape, the branding rights became AOL’s when it first purchased the business in 1998. It would go on to use the name to start a dial-up ISP in 2004, called Netscape Internet Service. It’s unclear precisely why this was done, given that AOL already was an ISP in its own right, which ran dial-up service all the way up until September 2025.

But for whatever reason, Netscape ISP kicked off operations on January 8, 2004, initially offering unlimited use for just $9.95 a month. Notably, it seems the name was the point—with the barebones site noting that you were getting a “reliable Internet connection from a name you trust.” It was also somewhat different from the contemporary AOL offering, in that you didn’t need a CD full of bloatware to access the service. The signup site went so far as to explain that you didn’t need to use a Netscape Navigator browser to access the service; any would do. As a cool bonus, you got a sweet “@netscape.com” email address when you signed up.
Even in 2016, the Netscape ISP was still offering dial-up connections only. However, you could get additional netscape.com email addresses for an extra $2.00 a month, along with various other add-ons of questionable value. Credit: Netscape ISP via Web Archive
The Netscape ISP maintained its cheap offering for many years. It also later added “Web Accelerator,” which was a simple compression tool that promised to let you surf the web “up to 5x faster.” In reality, it was marketing fluff that did not make a lot of difference to dial-up users chugging along on slow connections. Weirdly, the Netscape ISP never transitioned over to selling DSL or fiber or any sort of modern broadband connection. As recently as 2018, you could still sign up for a service that was entirely dial-up only. Eventually, at some point in the late 2010s or early 2020s, Netscape ISP appeared to stop accepting new signups, with the main webpage (isp.netscape.com) eventually turning into a generic news aggregator. It remains in that state today at the time of writing.

Perhaps the most hilarious part of the Netscape ISP story, though, is that it eventually spawned its own browser. Somewhere deep in the bowels of an AOL office, some poor developer had to hack together a Chromium fork to slap the Netscape ISP branding on it. You can still download it today, thanks to a link lurking on the bottom of the Netscape ISP site. We gave it a look.
The Netscape ISP page as it stands in 2026. This format has been used on the site since at least 2022; it appears the ISP stopped accepting new customers some years prior. Credit: isp.netscape.com
Hilariously, it’s an amalgamation of so many dying names from the early Internet—the privacy policy is hosted on Yahoo, because the now-defunct search engine merged with AOL in 2015. The browser is very obviously a reskinned version of Chromium from mid-2024, with a bit of AOL search bloatware thrown in for good measure.

While you can still download the silly 2024 “Netscape” browser, you can’t use the ISP anymore. That’s because AOL killed it dead in November 2025. Affected users will be able to maintain their super-cool netscape.com email addresses, but no more will you be able to dial up to access the Internet with your Netscape ISP account. To ease the change, AOL offered to transition affected users over to the “Complete by AOL” service, while also recommending alternatives like Starlink, HughesNet, Dialup4Less.com, and T-Mobile and Verizon 5G home internet plans. Yes, even in late 2025, your dying dial-up ISP was willing to recommend another that still operates on the old-fashioned phone lines, just as our ancestors intended.

One thing we’d love to see are the user statistics for the Netscape ISP over the past two decades. It’s hard to imagine there were a whole lot of people that were inconvenienced when AOL’s random off-shoot dial-up ISP went down in November 2025. It has to be some tiny figure, even less than the number of dial-up users that were still on the company’s main service, which shut down a month earlier. Still, they felt the need to issue a notice to users, so somebody must still have been calling in now and then, using their glacial 56K connection to check the weather and catch up on the latest updates in the Ivy League squash standings.

In any case, save for a tired old website and a rapidly-aging port of Chrome, Netscape is finally dead. For good this time. Until the logo turns up on a bunch of smart TVs and a badly-rebadged smartphone, or something. Until then, the big N shall hopefully be laid to rest.

Pi Compute Module Powers Fully Open Smartphone

With the powerful off-the-shelf hardware available to us common hardware hobbyist folk, how hard can it be to make a smartphone from scratch? Hence [V Electronics]’s Spirit smartphone project, with the video from a few months ago introducing the project.

As noted on the hardware overview page, everything about the project uses off the shelf parts and modules, except for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) carrier board. The LCD is a 5.5″, 1280×720 capacitive one currently, but this can be replaced with a compatible one later on, same as the camera and the CM5 board, with the latter swappable with any other CM5 or drop-in compatible solution.

The star of the show and the thing that puts the ‘phone’ in ‘smartphone’ is the Quectel EG25-GL LTE (4G) and GPS module which is also used in the still-not-very-open PinePhone. Although the design of the carrier board and the 3D printable enclosure are still somewhat in flux, the recent meeting notes show constant progress, raising the possibility that with perhaps some community effort this truly open hardware smartphone will become a reality.

youtube.com/embed/OgMdO0ckICg?…

Thanks to [tiel] for the tip.

hackaday.com/2026/01/27/pi-com…