From a mile-high perspective, of course the average engineer should see promise here... unless they work with microbiologists implementing bioengineering solutions, whether waste treatment, energy production, or biomass production. Then all of the complexity of even relatively simple earth-bound bioreactors will temper expectations.

The nutrients that a fungus needs are carbohydrates and oxygen. Everything I've seen indicates that radiotrophy (using radiation for energy) is just bonus energy; I really doubt we'll find any articles anywhere that say that it can live as a true autotroph (living on CO2 and light). That might not be possible even with aggressive genetic engineering - the nuts and bolts of it are that a fungus does its basic work the way all fungi do - as an obligate aerobe; i.e., it will die without oxygen.

Anyways, just to get your 2% shield, you'll need to be able to diffuse oxygen and a carbon substrate that it likes through the layer (or through the porous media you're growing it in to get multiple layers). Ask any microbiologist how easy it would be to convince a fungus to grow where you want it to, in a (relatively) homogenous 3-dimensional structure, and to keep a random pathogen from getting into your monoculture and buggering it all up.

Pardon the pun, but it would be astronomically difficult, even with all of the investments we've made in thin-film and three-dimensional bioreactors here on earth. I can't even think of a good example for this, but it would be like trying to make a Tesla run on gas. Ok, maybe you stick a generator in the trunk to get some a range boost - that part is easy, but ditching the whole integral charging system to make it JUST run on gas, and to operate as well or better than it did on electricity alone - that would be a heck of a lot more work. Not necessarily impossible, but probably not worth the effort.

10/10 would mod up if I had points

Temporarily?? No, I think they should make it permanent.

Comment sections on literally every news site are either painfully hamstrung (slow, heavy-handed review and moderation, like on gizmodo-family sites) or complete anarchy (sites that roll their own or use facebook comments, 2/3 of which are either spam or lunatic ravings).

The right thing to do would be to punt comments out of the article completely, with a link to (god help us) a reddit post, a slashdot article, or name your favorite community-moderated discussion site. The crowd typically filters better and faster even with limited mod support, and yahoo doesn't have to police every nazi comment or phishing link.

"Most importantly: why would anyone root for the demise of Intel?"

You're the third post and nobody had rooted for the demise of intel. I think more people are interested in the idea that Intel is being challenged to do more than ride it's marketing group, and that there may be a sea change if Intel seriously explores outsourcing production. Living in Phoenix, where Intel has 10s of billions of dollars in infrastructure, that would be the kind of monumental shift in the industry that hasn't been seen since Motorola's implosion.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame

The answer is no, we donâ(TM)t. The courts are at the whim of the legislative branch for any funding that they canâ(TM)t make up with fees.

I canâ(TM)t comprehend distance if it isnâ(TM)t measured in football fields

It's perfectly cromulent.

Donâ(TM)t forget: on a raspberry pi

Shakespeare and Newton spoke modern or early-modern English, which developed in around the Elizabethan period (shakespeares time). Chaucer wrote in Middle English, which is distinctly tougher than Shakespeare for a 21st century readerâ"it requires annotation. And old English is even more unintelligible to the modern reader.

I think that even if a million people up and went zombie in Wuhan you'd still have 2/3s of the governors in the US letting us know it's no big deal, and that even if it was, we could cure it with prayer and a bottle of Jim Bakker's Patent Tonic (yours free with a donation of $49.99).

Iâ(TM)m a consulting engineer and very much not retired. Itâ(TM)s a dopey poll that tells more about the authors limited world view than it does about the professions.

It's all bullshit, just like your outrage. If Tesla licenses a design from Medtronic and builds the thing to Medtronic's specs, the fucking thing is already FDA approved. You don't have to get FDA approval for each assembly line, just for the device itself.

By every measure, itâ(TM)s a strong but fast influenza. Perhaps you should stay in your lane as a cult heir and revolutionist and leave the epidemiology to people who spend their lives studying it.

And reality counters with:

a) Hydrogen does not transport as easily as electricity or any of the various liquids that we currently transport in pipelines/trucks;
b) OK
c) Hydrogen can't be filled into a car because no hydrogen filling stations exist and it's the hydrogen economy is not viable enough for anybody to invest in it;
d) Conversion of water to hydrogen is massively energy intensive to the point where nobody does it because cracking natural gas is so much more cost effective, and it's easier to transport electricity than hydrogen... why on earth would you inefficiently convert electricity to hydrogen and then inefficiently transport the hydrogen instead of just sending the electricity?
e) Citation needed.
f) Hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a hell of a lot longer than 20 years and you're banking on great gains?

and:

a) OK
b) No. "Rare Earths" is an archaic term; they're as common as dirt. We're currently spoiled by unsustainably low prices that can be traced to i) China's attempt to corner the market, in the case of lithium and ii) the fact that cobalt can be dug up in stupendous quantities BY HAND by people who survive on pennies per day. The costs for each could go up an order of magnitude and hydrogen would still be the stuff of dreams for armchair prognosticators.