The ridiculousness of some of the fictional materials you mention aside, it's looking more and more as if the majority of the mass of the universe is made up of non-baryonic matter that we can't identify. There also may be stable super-heavy elements we might discover some day, as well as non-standard arrangements of baryons that might also be stable. Maybe we'll also be able to make hybrid forms of baryonic/non-baryonic matter or novel arrangements of all sorts of other particle types. Then there's an entire theoretical periodic table of antimatter as well. We've only gotten as far as making anti-helium so far.
So, there are a lot of potential "real, actual" materials we may be able to play with some day, not to mention all kinds of chemical and nuclear tricks we still may have to learn with the materials we already have.
Once, the alchemists were crazy to think that elements could be transmuted. Then we learned more about the nature of matter and about atoms and chemical and nuclear bonds and it became even more obvious that the alchemists were crazy. Then we figured out that you actually can transmute elements. Your attitude that, essentially, everything has been discovered is just as bad as the attitude that anything is possible.

Hydrogen is known, to the best that the last 300 years of science can tell us, to be the most common element in the universe and oxygen is the third most common. Oxygen and hydrogen combine through a simple chemical reaction to form water. Hydrogen is hurled energetically outward from stars. For water to _not_ be common in most systems would require extra weirdness. It is true though that various processes might sequester it all in an oort-cloud-like region, but there's no good reason to think that wouldn't be highly unusual.

You can have your fingerprint stolen, although that's unlikely for school lunches. You can also lose your fingerprint from simple mechanical wear or chemicals. You can also simply not have fingerprints to start with.

Which has always struck me as a bit illogical since the embryos actually used are already slated for destruction. What do people think is going to happen to leftover human embryos that aren't slated to be implanted?

I think that was exactly the point.

It's sort of like how, when North Korea attempted a satellite launch not too long ago, the news was full of stories about how incredibly irresponsible it was since a satellite breaking up in orbit could turn into a chain reaction that would scour all orbits of all satellites. These stories were coming, of course, from the propaganda machines of countries which have, on more than one occasion, intentionally blown up satellites in orbit to demonstrate military power.

1. Swappable electric car batteries are the sane solution for fast-charging electric cars. Good to know it's actually on someone's radar. As for the cost, a city bus costs on the order of half a million dollars with operating costs around a quarter of a million dollars a year. With numbers like that, the batteries don't sound all that expensive. How many batteries you would need per bus depends on a number of factors. Charge time is a big one.

2. The trailer would be for mostly highway driving on fixed routes. Not a lot of tight twists and turns. The trailer also wouldn't have to be very long, and it's not as if segmented buses don't already exist. Aside from trailers, there's the possibility of roof mounting, or having some removable seats at the back and putting the extended battery storage inside the bus.

All of which is meaningless if the cell phone is compromised. Most indications are that, these days, even without viruses, most cell phones are already intentionally compromised straight from the factory. This really is a job for a dedicated device.

A electrically powered bus with overhead wires _and_ a battery could go down every road, more or less. There's still the problem of long haul trips. I'm still a little unclear on why the buses have to have a fixed battery capacity that has to charge in place as opposed to swappable, extendable batteries. Buses travel around on fixed routes with set schedules. Why can't there be multiple batteries for each bus, left charging at swap stations along the route. Make them automated. The driver can drive up, hop out, put a key into the swap station, position some forks onto the battery in the bus, push a button and have the used battery hauled out and a charged one slotted in. The whole thing shouldn't take more than five minutes. For long trips, why can't a bus haul a battery trailer with extra capacity?

But you either meant that, or you meant something else by "managed". Hence why the sentence is confusing.

Where you wrote "do you think they would have not used it?", you were referring to your previous sentence, so the meaning was "do you think they would have not used it to gain a huge strategic and tactical advantage?" Which basically means "do you think they would have not used it to gain command of LEO militarily. So, if "managed" means "command of LEO militarily", then the sentence boils down to: "If the Soviet Union had gained command of LEO militarily, then do you think they would have not used it to gain command of LEO militarily. "If X, then do you not think X" is a tautology.

The photos showing soldiers in helmets and vests sweeping the area with metal detectors suggests that they have at least considered it as a possibility.

I found a few other pictures looking around and there's definitely a lot of plants angled away from the crater. It might not have been a meteorite, but it definitely looks like there was an explosion rather than just a backhoe digging.

I actually took a look at the airport in google maps to see if I could identify the spot. There isn't enough to go on from the article. Some parts seem to definitely have ground-covering vegetation between the trees, but it's less clear in other parts, where it does look fairly brown between the trees. That could just be brown vegetation, however. Overall, the ground in the pictures seems far too devoid of small plants close to the crater. I'm definitely thinking that there's a layer of dirt there covering everything.

Trees being uprooted by sinkholes tend to be falling into the hole, not away from it. It's hard to see in the photo, but that tree looks like it's had most, but not all leaves blown off it. As for where the ejecta vanished to, it looks like where it vanished to is the area immediately around the crater. We don't have any sort of before and after picture or a picture of another part of the same wooded area, but the part that we can see seems to be all dirt except for where there are taller trees. It might be the case that there's normally nothing but bare dirt visible, or it might be the case that all the ground covering vegetation is covered in the thick layer of ejected dirt. There also seem to some loose, recently deposited, rocks outside the crater.

The part where you said "If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would not have used it?" is the confusing part. It's confusing because you seem to have written it from a parallel universe where the Soviet Union never "managed LEO". If by "managed" you meant using taking command of LEO militarily, then the sentence in question is a tautology and one wonders why you even wrote it.