Does this mean that bacteria in the middle of the cable live off the electric potential alone (and, I suppose, whatever nutrients they can find at their position in the wire, even if they are not energy-given)? If so, one could build biochemical factories for producing glucose polymers that use solar panels instead of leaves. Leaves are more practical by almost all accounts, except that they are not easy to deploy in space's vacuum....

Article from the Aarhus University group that is a little less hyped up:"Are all microbes electroactive?" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...

Took me a while to realise this wasn't about bacteria that congregate around undersea cables.

>“What is this?” I asked. “It looks like hair.” Marshall chuckled. “That’s them — the cable bacteria,” he said. “If you watch closely, you’ll see them twitching.” I stared harder. The filaments shifted.

This schmaltzy student-teacher roleplay immersion-journalism feels false and infantilizing to me. It makes me mistrustful of the text and I avoid reading essays written like it. The facts are embedded in an artificial adventure narrative as one feeds a dog a pill by hiding it in peanut butter. Why? Would the non-sensationalized, plainly framed information content be too un-stimulating for readers? Are false narratives hidden inside?

>Obama chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

Asimov Press / Nico McCarthy write excellent stories; well worth having a look at the Substack if you are not familiar with them.

The potential (positive) environmental impact of cable bacteria is notable.

"Given that rice agriculture alone accounts for about 11 percent of human-driven methane emissions, adding cable bacteria to rice paddies could have an enormous positive impact on the environment."

Who knew rice paddies were such a huge contributor to climate change.

Hmmm .. was looking for some potential about power generation, guess the idea never sparked.

Hmm... It would be nice to replace axons in human with these structures. The speed of propagation of spikes will be much higher. I'm not sure that it worth it to replace axons in brains, but those long axons in a spinal cord and in optic nerve can really benefit from the faster signal propagation and reduce the reaction time.

My boss says the same thing about me.