Being road warriors isn’t quite as hard when you have a Jett.

That would be junior Jett Feeney, the dynamic Moorhead quarterback who rushed for two touchdowns and threw for two more as the Spuds defeated Centennial 35-21 in a Class 6A state quarterfinal matchup on Thursday night at Spring Lake Park High School.

The Spuds (7-4) — who have now had to make the three-and-a-half hour-plus drive to the Twin Cities metro seven times in their first season in Class 6A — advance to meet the winner of Friday’s quarterfinal between Maple Grove and Lakeville South (scheduled for 6 p.m. at Eastview High School) in the semifinals at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 14 at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The Cougars finished their season 9-2 overall.

It was a neutral site Thursday, but the trip from Centennial High School to Spring Lake Park was just 6.8 miles. Moorhead, meanwhile, traveled just over 228 miles.

Yet, the Spuds showed no signs of travel lag on their first possession. After taking over on the Cougars’ 38-yard line following a shanked punt, Feeney kept the drive alive with a 24-yard pass to junior Taye Reich.

Two plays later, the quarterback scored untouched from 7 yards out to put his team on top 7-0.

Centennial answered back, tying the score on a 50-yard touchdown run by senior Calvin Coopersmith with 2:55 to play in the first quarter.

Feeney put the Spuds back on top early in the second quarter, connecting with junior Zak Walker on a 44-yard pass before scoring again on a 3-yard touchdown run.

But once more, the Cougars responded, marching 75 yards to score on a 5-yard touchdown run from senior Caleb Melser that tied the score 14-all with 4:45 to play in the second.

However, Feeney and the Moorhead offense struck again just before halftime, helped by a costly pass interference call against the Cougars that set the stage for a touchdown pass to junior David Mack on 4th-and-1 at the Centennial 4. That sent the Spuds into the locker room leading 20-14.

And the momentum continued to start the second half when Reich returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. The 2-point conversion expanded the Moorhead lead to 28-14.

Centennial again had an answer, scoring on a 28-yard touchdown run by sophomore Edwin Ekah to cut the gap to seven.

Yet, the Cougars just couldn’t slow down the Spuds’ offense. Moorhead scored again late in the third when Feeney connected with senior Jaimeson Dunlap on a 14-yard touchdown pass.

Centennial had the ball inside the Spuds’ 20 in the fourth but ended up turning it over on downs. Feeney and company then ran out the clock to move on to the semifinals and yet another road trip to the Twin Cities.

Moorhead is trying to win its first state championship since beating Winona 13-7 in the old Class AA classification in 1987.

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RALEIGH, N.C. – After a promising start in a tough environment, the Carolina Hurricanes found an answer for everything the Minnesota Wild could throw at them.

Matt Boldy had a pair of goals to snap out of a notable drought, and Minnesota’s special teams continued a strong stretch, only to see the Hurricanes rally for a 4-3 win. Brock Faber got his second goal of the season.

Looking for a third consecutive win, the Wild twice held one-goal leads and also came back to forge a 3-all tie in the second period. But the Hurricanes stormed back at every turn.

Filip Gustavsson, making his 12th start in goal for the Wild, had a shaky start. Carolina scored four times on its first eight shots. After that, the goalie settled in and finished with 23 saves in the loss

Minnesota fell to 5-7-3 with the loss, and are now 0-6-1 when trailing after the first period.

The Wild got the game’s first power play but could not muster a shot on goal. But with the teams back to even strength a short time later, Kirill Kaprizov got loose in the middle of the offensive zone and made a rush to the net that was thwarted. Boldy was able to punch the loose puck in before Carolina goalie Frederik Andersen could cover it.

Boldly had scored just once in the Wild’s previous 10 games.

After the Wild killed their first penalty of the game, fourth line winger Tyler Pitlick leveled Carolina defenseman Jalen Chatfield with an open-ice check. After a brief fight, Chatfield was helped off the ice and Pitlick was ejected from the game for the illegal hit to the head.

Chatfield did not return to the game, officially listed as dealing with an upper body injury.

With the teams skating four-on-four, Carolina’s Jackson Blake made a coast-to-coast rush with the puck and snapped a low shot past Gustavsson to tie the game. But the Wild answered 31 seconds later, reclaiming the lead at 2-1 via a Brock Faber wrist shot after a set up pass from Kaprizov.

The lead was brief, as Andrei Svechnikov fooled Gustavsson with a low shot on the next shift. The trio of goals in 52 seconds was the fastest three-goal span in the NHL this season.

The Wild killed the rest of the extended penalty only to see Carolina take the lead on a long shot through a crowd in front of the Minnesota net five seconds after the teams were back to full strength.

Minnesota had three shots in the first period, and Andersen stopped one of them.

Opening the middle frame on a power play, the Wild needed 37 seconds to tie the game as Vladimir Tarasenko fed Boldy for a tap-in goal. The tie was again brief, as Carolina scored on the ensuing faceoff, nine seconds later, to lead 4-3.

With just over eight minutes left in regulation, Kaprizov looked to have an open net for the tying goal, only to have Hurricanes defenseman Sean Walker disrupt the play. Minnesota made a furious final push with Gustavsson on the bench but could not get the equalizer.

Andersen finished with 19 saves for the Hurricanes, who make their only visit to St. Paul this season on Nov. 19.

The Wild’s current two-game Eastern road swing concludes on Friday night when they visit the New York Islanders for the only time this season. Their game at UBS Arena on Long Island faces off at 6 p.m. CT.

Briefly

The Hurricanes lineup featured three veterans of Minnesota prep hockey: K’Andre Miller (Minnetonka), Mike Reilly (Holy Angels) and Blake (Eden Prairie). But the Wild lineup featured the only player from the Carolinas. Ryan Hartman was raised in suburban Chicago, but he was born in 1994 in Hilton Head Island, S.C. and was the first NHL player born in South Carolina.

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A judge, citing insufficient evidence for a trial to proceed, dismissed a case this week against a man who was accused of lighting a St. Paul apartment on fire three years ago.

Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro threw out the case against Matthew Ryan Gieske on Tuesday as a jury trial was about to begin, later noting in his order that the prosecution said in court the witness who could identify Gieske as the man who started the fire would not be called to testify.

“The State did not provide a reason why it was not calling the witness,” the judge’s dismissal order read.

Dennis Gerhardstein, spokesman for the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, said Thursday in a statement that a “key witness” had left Minnesota and could not be located for trial.

Gieske, 42, of St. Paul, had been charged with first-degree arson in connection with the blaze at an apartment building in the city’s North End neighborhood on Sept. 7, 2021. He was found to be incompetent to face the charge in August 2023, and later civilly committed for a mental illness. In July, he was found competent for court proceedings.

Partially melted gas can recovered

According to the criminal complaint, a man told police he saw Gieske holding a butcher knife outside the apartment building in the 1600 block of Marion Street. The man, who was a tenant, said he was familiar with Gieske and knew he “had displayed odd behavior in the past,” the complaint read.

When Gieske pointed the knife at the man and his sister, the man clicked his handgun’s safety and asked Gieske to get away from them, the complaint said.

Gieske left, but came back later and tried to get into the man’s second-floor apartment, the complaint alleged. The man looked out his peephole and saw Gieske and heard the noise of someone shaking a lighter fluid can.

The man said he saw Gieske holding something that was on fire, possibly a lighter, and then saw flames rush up his door. The flames entered his apartment over and underneath the door, and the man escaped via his balcony. The building was evacuated, and no one was injured.

Police recovered a partially melted gas can in the hallway and noted that the building was severely damaged by fire.

Officers made contact with Gieske, who “appeared to be in crisis and did not follow directives,” the complaint said. He was taken into custody, and the man identified him as the man at his door. Gieske declined to give a statement to police.

‘State lacks sufficient evidence’

On Tuesday, prior to calling for the jury, Castro asked the prosecution and defense about witnesses who were going to testify at trial.

The prosecution identified several witnesses, but said none would be able to identify Gieske as the person who intentionally started the fire, according to Castro’s dismissal order.

“The only identity evidence the State could offer was that the Defendant was seen leaving the apartment complex that was engulfed in flames,” the order read. “First responders were attempting to evacuate the apartment complex at that time.”

The prosecution sought to introduce body-worn camera evidence of two people identifying the clothing of a person they saw exiting the apartment building. Castro, after reviewing the body-worn footage, concluded their statements were in response to investigative questioning and “were not excited utterances,” his order read. “The statements would therefore be excluded without the testimony of the witnesses.”

Castro wrote the prosecution did not intend to produce evidence that could create a link “between (the Defendant) and the person who started the fire.”

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“Other than the Defendant’s presence at or around the scene of the fire, no other evidence, circumstantial or direct, would be produced that would implicate the Defendant,” the order read.

Castro noted that, based on what the prosecution told him in court, no evidence of motive or opportunity to commit the crime would be presented at trial.

“Therefore, this Court concludes that based on the evidence that would be presented at trial, the State lacks sufficient evidence to establish probable cause and present this matter to a trier of fact,” the order read.

Gieske remains in custody on a pending civil petition as mentally ill and dangerous filed by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. A trial on the matter is set for Dec. 19 before Judge Timothy Carey.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) — For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — “to cure, prevent or manage all disease” — if not in their lifetime, then in their children’s. But during that time, they also funded underprivileged schools, immigration reform and efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion.

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Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair’s science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop virtual, AI-based cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation and use AI to “harness the immune system” for disease detection, prevention and treatment.

“I feel like the science work that we’ve done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday evening at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California. Three other Biohub institutes — in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, focus on addressing different scientific challenges.

Chan and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth — from shares of Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO — toward these efforts. Since 2016, when Biohub launched, they have donated $4 billion to basic science research, a figure that does not include operating expenses for running a large-scale computer cluster for life science research. The organization says it is now on track to double that amount over the next decade, with an operating budget of about $1 billion a year.

Last week, singer Billie Eilish told an audience that included Chan and Zuckerberg that rich people should do more to address the world’s problems.

“Love you all, but there’s a few people in here who have a lot more money than me,” she said, to a smattering of applause. “And if you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? And no hate, but give your money away, shorties.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s charitable organization, has been faced with criticism recently for curtailing its other philanthropic work. Earlier this year, it stopped funding grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion, immigration advocacy and other issues currently in the crosshairs of the Trump administration — though the focus has been shifting to science and away from social issues for years, the couple says, long before the 2024 election.

“So we basically looked at the ecosystem of science funding and decided that the place that we can make the biggest impact was on tool development,” Zuckerberg said. “And specifically working on long-term projects, 10 to 15 years, where the output of them was taking on a biological challenge that would produce a tool that scientists everywhere could use to accelerate the pace of science.”

The organization earlier this year scrubbed its website’s mentions of DEI, including a statement saying “People of color and marginalized communities have experienced a long history of exploitation in the name of scientific research, and indeed science has itself been deployed as a tool of oppression.”

“Going forward, Biohub will be our primary philanthropic effort and where we’ll dedicate the vast majority of our resources,” Zuckerberg and Chan said in a blog post Thursday. “We will continue our other philanthropic efforts as well, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will serve as infrastructure and support for our initiatives.”

Zuckerberg and Chan’s increased commitment to science research comes as the Trump administration has cut billions in scientific research and public health funding.

Chan, who had worked as a pediatrician and treated children with rare diseases, says what she wanted “more than anything was a way to see what was happening inside their cells — how genetic mutations were expressed in different cell types and what, exactly, was breaking down.”

“Until now, that kind of understanding has been out of reach. AI is changing that. For the first time, we have the potential to model and predict the biology of disease in ways that can reveal what’s gone wrong and how we can develop new treatments to address it,” she said.

On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub has hired the team at EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI systems for the life sciences. Alex Rives, EvolutionaryScale’s co-founder, will serve as Biohub’s head of science, leading research efforts on experimental biology, data and artificial intelligence. The financial terms were not disclosed.

Biohub’s ambition for the next years and decades is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible without recent advances in AI. Similar to how large language models learn from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its researchers and scientists are working toward building virtual systems that serve as digital representations of human physiology on all levels, such as molecular, cellular or genome. As it is open source — free and publicly available — scientists can then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.

Noting that Biohub launched when the couple had their first child, Chan listed off some of the organization’s accomplishments, ranging from building the largest single-cell data set, contributing to one of the largest human cell maps, building sensors to measure inflammation in real-time in living cells and researching rare diseases.

That work continues, with a focus on using AI to advance biomedical research.

“And to anchor it back onto the impact on patients, you know, why do this?” Chan said. “It’s like, why is a virtual cell important? We have cured diseases for mice and for flies and for zebrafish, many, many times. And that’s great. But we want to make sure that we are actually using biology to push the forefront of medicine for people — and that is so promising.”