Google and Xreal Team Up On Your Face - DTNS 5160

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 8th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you some context, and try to help each other understand. Today on DTNS, Jason Howell tells us about Google's Project Aura Glasses from Xreal. Justin Robert Young helps us understand Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. And Dr. Nicky tells us about Mushroom Resisters. Yeah, just a quiet holiday news day, you know, slow Monday. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. so google and xreal uh today announced its project aura glasses there's also some other news coming from google about their glasses and vr strategy mixed reality strategy jason howell got the scoop on all of that jason thanks for joining us my goodness today is not a quiet day is it not at all sorry to pull you in on a monday man yeah i know yeah totally usually mondays are my all right let's see what happens for the rest of the week.

1:01But today it's been like to the wall the entire morning. Well, let's start with Project Aura. What is this one about? Yeah. So I think the big story for me on Project Aura is I think standard like headset VR and XR has a real problem, which is that it requires a lot of extra, right? Like it's a huge headset. You're blocking yourself off from reality. You're like locking yourself into this incredibly immersive experience So there's value there. But you're really kind of sacrificing a lot in the process. And then you've got your AI glasses, which are on the other end, right? Like they can do some neat things.

1:38But often, I think with what we've seen so far, we kind of want them to do a little more. Project Aura, which is a collaboration between Google and Xreal. And so this is a prototype. I don't know when it's going to release. I think sometime next year. It's really kind of the middle ground. because what it is is it's a binocular kind of glasses approach with a little you know a puck like device so it's wired to a puck that you would keep in your pocket similar to what we've seen with some of the other headsets like the apple vision pro that sort of thing all of the compute same compute by the way that's in the galaxy xr uh headset is in that puck oh wow the battery everything's there so the headset's really light and essentially the idea here is that you get closer to kind of the vision of augmented reality and the immersive quality of VR in a smaller, more accessible form factor.

2:32Sure, it doesn't wrap entirely around your eyes and close off reality, but it gives you a wider field of view than what we've seen in a lot of other smaller solutions and has the full Android XR experience. So basically, for the most part, what you get out of like a Galaxy XR, you're going to get out of this. and it's just like, I would feel comfortable pulling these out on an airplane. I would not feel comfortable putting a Galaxy XR device on my head in an airplane. I know I'd feel ridiculous if I did that, but with these, like I could actually do that and I'd be okay with it. And these are, so these are lighter.

3:07These are quite a bit lighter. I have the Xreal One Pro, which plug into a phone, right? By USB-C. So they're basically external monitors. This is that, but without the phone. Instead, they gave you a specialized pack, I guess, that is going to deliver the Galaxy XR style experience. Right. Yeah, exactly. The Galaxy XR experience, you know, that hinges on Android XR as a platform. Apps, games, notifications, cameras, like the whole nine yards coming in from that puck that you have in your pocket. So it's a separate device. You don't use this with your phone. You're just using the puck. Although I have to imagine that there's some Bluetooth syncing notifications, you know, you could probably set that up, but no, it relies on the puck entirely.

3:57It's its own device, but it's not as big as the XR. So what are the trade-offs? What is our field of view? What's the specs on this? Yeah, 70 degree field of view. You can do full, you know, six degrees of freedom tracking and everything. So you can pin displays around your environment, move forward, move back. You know, there's, God, is it two or four tracking cameras? I want to say they told me there was two tracking cameras, but I may have transcribed that wrong. Plus an additional camera for, you know, taking pictures, taking video, that sort of stuff. And, you know, it's slightly tinted. So if you go outdoors with these, which personally I would not choose to do, but you know what someone's gonna do it because it's kind of a mobile type device um it you know it kind of blocks off most of the view and like a sunglasses shade and then has the displays that superimpose information on top of the world and yeah xr2 gen 2 chip inside i don't know the the size of the battery i don't know you know how much memory or anything like that but um i will say the little puck device looks a lot like a smartphone but it's not a glass touch screen it's it's like a large touch pad and so that can be an additional input device input device but you know the the on uh device tracking can track your hands the same way that it does on a galaxy br headset so it sounds like these are we're not yet to wear these are just glasses that you just wear all the time like you would the let's say the the meta ray-bans or oakley's but they're getting close you don't necessarily look like you should be on a ski lift when you're wearing somebody else is that is that basically the the you know what we're getting from this that you know they look like they look closer to regular glasses because i don't know if you want to walk down the street wearing these things totally i mean they look closer to regular glasses if you see the the press images that they released because they didn't allow me to take video or or shoot footage of this particular prototype, but they did release some images.

5:58If you see them, they look closer to normal glasses. Similar, I'm sure, in some ways to what you were talking about, Tom, from X-Reel, right? Yeah, they look very similar to the One Pros. It's just you have the puck, right? Yeah, and inside behind the lenses, you have that additional kind of display layer or whatever. What they said is that this is designed for episodic use, which is like you've got a productivity use case, you've got a gaming use case. I was able to play a tabletop game, by the way, in this. And I like that alone was a reason for me to want this because it was so captivating.

6:35The really cool thing about that, too, the game was called Damio, is my understanding was that the developers didn't even change any code to make it work that well inside of Android XR and in that glasses experience. It just did. And it was really impressive. So this isn't meant for all day wear. Not yet. But as you can see, all these cases are kind of converging and we're kind of getting to the point to where you can see on the horizon where we get to the point to where the glasses are that and can be that all the time. So no name, no price, no release date. Sounds like they'll come in lower than the Galaxy XR, of course, but we don't know price.

7:17Also not a thing you want to wear around all the time. So not coming for the Ray-Ban meta line. But Google did have an announcement that is targeted towards that line. Well, so they showed off something. So I was out at the Google campus a year ago, and they invited me out really early on to test out a couple of prototypes. also a prototype of Galaxy XR when it was called Project Muhan. But they had showed me a monocular and binocular version of their Astra glasses. And so this time I got to go out again and they had kind of like their updated versions of them, which by all accounts really kind of look very similar from like a fashion type approach.

8:00You know, they look like normal glasses. But they did announce that their consumer glasses that have these displays going to be launching in 2026. They're going to have, obviously, the single display, the binocular display, if that's what you want. And these are, of course, kind of satisfying what you were talking about, Rob. These are meant to be eyewear first. They're really kind of hoping that these become all day wear type of glasses. Another piece of news attached to this is that developer kits, which are the monocular version, if I'm not mistaken, that I tested out last week. That is a developer kit that is going to be distributed to developers to get started starting today.

8:40So we're going to start to hear and see more of these out somewhere. Gotcha. So that is with the display. So we're going to see more glasses next year between Meta, Google and others. that have a bit of a display, not a total augmented reality display, but a bit of a display in there. And then we also got a little bit of an update to the Galaxy XR, if you're willing to splash down a couple of thousand dollars. I'm really excited about at least one of these updates. I mean, they announced a few things. Photorealistic avatars are now in beta for video calls, so you can get that kind of experience in the headset, which I got to test and it was actually pretty cool.

9:23PC connect. So you can wirelessly stream content from your PC at 60 frames per second over wifi. I was able to, um, stream, I think an app, I can't remember what the app was exactly, but there was an app, you know, pinned below. And then they were like, and then if you want to open up a YouTube, you know, to like get a sense of how to use it. And so I opened up YouTube and pulled up a tutorial and pinned it above it. And I could look up and down and everything like that. But the thing that I'm really excited about, oh, and visual annotations coming sometime next year where Gemini can put information on top of things in the real world.

9:58But the thing I'm super excited about is something that they showed off a couple of months ago. I was out in New York for the Galaxy XR release, and they showed off, teased ahead to something called auto-spatialization, which is a system-wide feature. It adds spatialized depth to any 2D content, and they've got specific approaches and algorithms to determine what is doable or useful in this, which is like videos, photos, games, that kind of stuff. You don't want to mess with UI elements, right? So they've got the smarts to do that, all with 20 milliseconds of latency. And so I sat down, they opened up YouTube, they were like, pick any video you want on YouTube.

10:36I picked out the F1 movie trailer 2d and it auto-spatialized with no thinking whatsoever it just poof it it started playing it was in full 3d and it was incredibly convincing if they had played it for me and i didn't know what i had just done i would have just kind of thought that it was 3d okay yeah i can't wait i've got a galaxy xr so uh i have been looking for what it can do and uh so it'll be good to to get a software update on that and see how that looks. Yeah. It was really impressive. I'm looking forward, Tom, to you actually updating your XRs and just letting us know that that 3D sounds really cool.

11:1520 milliseconds is really fast. Oh, yeah. You don't even at 20 milliseconds, you don't even really notice it. You know what I mean? It just kicks right into gear. So, yeah, it's super fast. Yeah. I mean, I've been saying 2026 is the year of smart glasses of all stripes. And it looks like Google has got a product for every stripe. Yeah. And Justin Payne. So I spoke with Justin Payne, who's Google's senior director of product management for XR. Also had a demo with Max Speer, who's product lead of XR at Google. And I have an interview with Justin on the AI Inside podcast. So if you want a full interview, that's over there.

11:54But one thing that he said near the end of that, which is kind of similar to what you were just saying, 2026 is going to be a really cool year. But he was like, but I'm telling you right now, just wait for 2027 because we've got some really sick stuff planned. So that's not much to go on. Based on what I'm seeing over the last year and where we are, I just think Google's – honestly, I think Google's learned a lot of lessons from the Google Glass experience 13, 14 years ago where they released this hardware far ahead of its time. They didn't have the platform in place. They didn't make it easy for developers to get on board.

12:29They're addressing those things this time around, not to mention having Gemini at the core from the beginning. I personally see AI and XR as like peanut butter and chocolate. Like they're so good together. And so I'm super excited if you can't tell. Yeah. Yeah. And they won't be the only ones pushing this stuff out. I agree that 2027 will probably be the more exciting year because look, Project Aura looks cool and it's nice to be able to not have to plug it into your phone. but I'm not sure that it's going to be that much different of an experience than the one I have that plugs into the phone.

13:03And that one became sort of like, oh, it's nice to lay down and watch a movie kind of situation, but not something I would recommend that most people need. And I'm not sure I'm going to feel that much different about this one. I mean, you will get, I don't know how deep that goes down the hand tracking and interactive elements. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see. You're going to get a lot more of that with Aura, which I think is one of the big differentiations right like when you think of kind of the expanded use case of something like the galaxy xr you know and and kind of thinking of that as like the pinnacle of like well how far can we push this aura really is the middle point that says all right all that cool stuff just smaller you know and and uh so that has me authentically excited because i think it does at that point move into a zone that's a little bit like like i could consider sitting down and doing my work on those far easily more easily than sitting down with the galaxy xr and doing work you know what i mean yeah it's totally different so there's that your neck will last longer yeah although i did feel a little forehead heat when i put those glasses on for what it's worth that that existed but yeah dt ness is made possible by you the listener thanks to paul thesen ali sanjabi ab puppy and our brand new patrons dean nathan and art new patrons thank you dean thank you nathan thank you art thank you jason there's more we need to know today following netflix's announcement of an agreement to buy warner brothers streaming and studios last friday paramount announced it will try a hostile takeover this is uh not terribly surprising uh to me uh it's going to go directly to shareholders to see if it can convince them to take Paramount's offer instead of Netflix's offer.

14:53Paramount wants to buy all of Warner Brothers Discovery and says it has made six offers total before being declined by the Warner Brothers Discovery board. It says, in fact, David Ellison said, I texted Zaslav and said, we'll go higher. So it said that they weren't done yet. Paramount CEO David Ellison, son of Oracle owner Larry Ellison, says Warner's board did not treat it seriously. He says it did not treat it fairly. So they're going right to the shareholders with a$30 a share. So he didn't raise it in this particular instance for all of Warner Brothers discovery and promising that Paramount's offer will pass regulatory scrutiny, whereas Netflix's might not.

15:36Paramount's bid is partly backed by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, which will forego voting rights. He says getting them to forego voting rights will make it easier to pass scrutiny. That's the only regulatory scrutiny that people talk about when they talk about Paramount's offer. Netflix's offer is talked about with regulatory scrutiny because of the size of the companies involved. Netflix's offer, to remind you, is$23.25 a share,$4.50 per share in Netflix stock for a total of$27.75 a share for just studios and streaming. That leaves the cable networks as a standalone spin-out company that they could sell to somebody else, probably for less.

16:16And yes, a total of$27.75 a share is still less than$30 a share. You're not crazy. But since Netflix's offer includes stock, it's deemed to be worth$31 to$32 a share ultimately, which is why the board accepted that offer. Now, this is a deal. So if Warner Brothers backs away and says, you know what, we're going to go with Paramount. They owe Netflix a$2.8 billion breakup fee. And on the Netflix side, if Netflix can't get this deal done, if it can't pass regulatory scrutiny, Netflix is on the hook for a$5.8 billion breakup fee. Signals from the administration, however, are mixed. Before a Kennedy Center event, the president said the deal could be a problem because it would result in a large market share for the streaming giant.

17:02He added, I'll be involved in that decision. but then in a social media post blasting 60 Minutes for having representative Marjorie Taylor Green on the show the president criticized Paramount for letting the show air writing my real problem with the show was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes Paramount would allow a show like this to air and then typical all caps they are no better than the old ownership who better to assess how these seemingly contradictory wins from Washington will affect all this than Justin Robert Young, host of Politics, Politics, Politics. Justin, thank you for joining us.

17:37Always a pleasure, Tom. So give us, read the tea leaves from the political side of this, because it does seem like Netflix has a solid deal and Paramount's, you know, making an attempt to steal it from them. And it kind of rests on the regulatory environment. you know i don't know whether or not that is the case that is certainly the case that the ellisons and uh paramount are which now it's it's so funny we were it feels like five seconds ago referring to them as skydance and now skydance has dove into the paramount suit and now we're just going to talk about paramount but the ellisons have leaned on this idea that they are in a better position to pass regulatory muster, not only because they are in the market size that they are and they're willing to take on more stuff, but rather they also on the over the top have this closer relationship with Donald Trump, specifically Larry Ellison and Trump.

18:39And yet Bloomberg put out a great TikTok piece, not the platform, but the way that stories are described when they're walking minute by minute through a big deal that Ted Sarandos and Netflix believe that the Ellisons are overstating their relationship to the administration and that when Ted Sarandos has gone to meet with Donald Trump, Trump seemed to believe, quote unquote, that the highest bidder should win and that there shouldn't really be much of a problem in Netflix clearing that regulatory hurdle. I still think that even if Joe Biden were the president, that Netflix buying as big of a streaming service as Warner Brothers would be something that you would have to look at twice.

19:28But I don't know whether or not anybody has the real inside track here, especially because I don't know if people have picked up on this, but the president of the friends or forever enemies. This is a carousel that oftentimes moves faster than the American imagination would want it to. Yeah. A few screeners for advanced viewings of a Netflix project could go a long way to swaying someone. As I joked, I said, Tom, the truth social, I said, Sarandos hit Trump with the Stranger Things screeners. And the next post is going going to be weak, Vecna. Could not do it. Yeah, I don't get too much of a sense of what the Warner Brothers major investors think of this.

20:19They've been fairly quiet and I think trusting of the board, which tends to indicate that the investors themselves do agree that the Netflix offer is the better offer because you get the stock and Netflix stock is more valuable than the Paramount stock, let's face it. And even though Paramount is making an all cash offer, it's making an all cash offer that includes the cable nets, which means that you actually are going to not be able to sell the cable net separately. Now, whether that's a positive or a negative is a whole separate issue. So that's why I said, I think this does end up resting on regulatory, unless we find out that one of the investors is swayed by Ellison's amount and says, oh, we think$30 a share of cash is a better offer.

21:01I think it will come down to whether those investors are skeptical about whether this can pass regulatory scrutiny. And the indications by the stock market were that they dropped the stock of Netflix a little. They dropped the stock of Warner a little because they seem to be skeptical whether it can pass. I don't know what basis they could knock it out on unless you look at overall dominance of, you know, Warner Brothers Discovery as far as just the amount of content that it creates. But while Netflix is a very good streamer and certainly leads, if you don't count YouTube, it leads in streamers.

21:44Warner Brothers Discovery is not. According to Nielsen, 1.3%, putting it down eighth or ninth, depending on how you count it. So not adding a lot of streaming numbers to Netflix, but definitely adding a lot of cable, obviously adding theatrical and adding a lot of content, a lot of intellectual property that Netflix doesn't have. I P it means that the new Superman movie could eventually be direct to Netflix, which is the other side of this. When you talk about regulatory hurdles, you are talking about the industry for which it would affect. And when you are talking about the industries that these companies primarily affect, it's roughly maybe 2000 people that all know each other in New York and Los Angeles.

22:32And we are talking about the wider world of media creation, media buying, and media airing, right? These are all sort of like disparate worlds that in a bygone era, you had a lot of players that would create things and people would buy it and then they would distribute it to various different channels. now you are in a collapsing market what i have heard at least just anecdotally of talking to people around the worlds of television and movies is that they would be way happier with paramount buying them than netflix buying them because they believe netflix is going to just collapse this hive that every time you are that you hear ted sarandos talking about we're going to honor those Warner Brothers theatrical movie dates, the unheard suffix to that sentence is for as long as we can justify, eventually justify by our share price that we need to bring everything back to our platform.

23:33Because I didn't buy Warner Brothers so the new Harry Potter show could, or new Harry Potter movie series that we're going to do wouldn't be direct to Netflix. Batman's going to debut on Netflix. That's the reason why you spend the amount of money for this in the first place. on the paramount side they seem to have a commitment to these things the people that you hear mostly that worry about it and this i believe was a semaphore article today is on the cable side because cnn the ellisons just bought cbs the idea would be that that would be a combined newsroom and you would essentially have two different broadcast outlets for the same uh a fire hose.

24:11That's who you hear complain about that. And I'll tell you, the sympathetic ear from the White House is more on the glamour side than it is on the cable side. Donald Trump would relish in the idea that cable news gets slaughtered so the share price can remain high, whereas he has a soft spot for the silver screen. This is a guy that wanted to initially go to USC, I just found out. He thought about being in the big motion picture business. He allegedly pushed for Rush Hour 4 to be greenlit by Paramount. I think that's part of it. And when you are looking at regulatory issues, there's not a lot of people that are involved in this business.

25:02And I think most of them are upset about the idea of Netflix getting it more so than Paramount. Excellent. Well, thank you, Justin, for helping us kind of understand. We've got the Hollywood wind. We've got the administration weather vane that may point one way or another. And we've got the insurance tech company. So it is going to be an interesting 12 to 18 months as we let this whole process. Don't hold your breath because you will definitely die. This thing is going to be a slow, slow movie. This would be two seasons of succession. It's a very succession-y plot, but this would be a two-season arc.

25:40Fantastic. If folks want to find your political analysis, it is excellent. I highly recommend it. Where should you go? Politics, politics, politics.com. Thanks, man. Thank you. And since Justin and I talked Paramount's David Ellison, full press mode, giving a press interview, promising that Paramount is committed to a theatrical slate of 30 plus theatrical releases per year. Definitely trying to rally Hollywood and the theater companies to his side. Rob, what do you think? We've got a long time before we have to call ourselves, but early bets, what do you think? It feels like the studios are starting to play the game Highlander.

26:22There can only be one. It's like they haven't started fighting yet, but they're feeling itchy. They're feeling twitchy when people get around each other and they're they're starting to uh they're starting to basically uh sharpen the swords and they're going to battle with each other so it's like uh ellison has wanted this company for a while they've made numerous bids and it for whatever reason you know warner brothers didn't accept any of them so now it's like okay well let's let's see what let's see what your shareholders say what about this yeah so we're in we're in that game now to where they're going to, you know, they want what they want.

26:58And, you know, we'll see how the shareholders react. Yeah, we will indeed. All right, let's get to some quick headlines. These are the kinds of things that are good to know if you just want to understand other news in the future. Business Insider saw an internal memo from Meta indicating the company's mixed reality glasses, codename Phoenix, will not debut in 2026 in order to deliver a more polished and reliable experience. Oh, man, that takes away from my 2026 is the year of the glasses, but kind of clears the field for Google, I guess. China's rare earth exports rose 26.5 % in November, the first full month since the leaders of China and the United States conducted trade talks that have eased those sorts of export restrictions.

27:40India's Tana Group has signed Intel as a customer for two semiconductor facilities being built in the country to explore manufacturing and packaging Intel products for the Indian market. Oh, nothing India likes better than you making stuff in India to sell to people in India. The European Commission said starting in January, Meta will give users a choice between seeing more personalized advertising by sharing some data or using the services for free but sharing less data. Something that Meta had already offered European Facebook and Instagram users but has now implemented in a way that seems like it may have satisfied the European Commission.

28:18EC still assessing these changes before closing its investigation. Yeah, I thought that this is what they already said they would do. So I guess they're now doing it. Bloomberg reports that the head of Apple's chip design division, Johnny Surugi, told employees in a memo Monday, quote, I know you've been reading all kind of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear it directly from me. I love my team and I love my job at Apple, and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. All right. So if you've been hearing the scuttlebutt, Johnny says the scuttlebutt is not true.

28:49Is Johnny lying? Probably not. Probably not. Those are the essentials today. Let's dive a little deeper. Researchers from Ohio State, that's my neck of the woods, Ohio State University, grew mem resistors out of shiitake mushrooms. What's that and why? Tom and Dr. Nikki explain. Dr. Nikki, thank you for bringing me such a delicious memory story. Yes, it's delicious and crunchy and nutritious. Before I start, maybe you can get us started with the tech of this story. Sure. So shiitake mushrooms are often used in ramen. No, I'm sorry. You want the memrister part of this. Memristers is a combination of memory and resistor.

29:32I'm not like an expert in them or anything, but it is basically what it says. a resistor, an electrical device that remembers its resistance based on what electrical current passed through it previously. So you can use that to store information even when the power is turned off. So it is a resistive form of memory, hence Memrister. There are some IoT devices, some sensors out there that have very low power random access memory based on Memristor. Fujitsu makes some of those. But this is still a very experimental technology. The automotive industry has been investigating using it a lot. It's one of those techs that's been around for a while and still has a lot of potential, if you know what I mean.

30:22So what we're getting into here is they're taking this novel technology and making it more novel by trying to make Memristors out of mushrooms. And so that would make it cheaper to make me maybe that's part of the goal. Um, it's kind of the, the researchers have said it's part of a long-term goal of developing a computer that behaves like a brain. Um, I haven't gotten to that part of Star Trek yet, but I'll believe you. So this team, uh, decided to use the shiitake mushroom, not only because they're delicious, but because, uh, mycelial networks can be described as behaving somewhat like neural networks in the brain.

31:00One, because of their connective structure, and also they can transmit information between each other using chemical signals, which is also one of the ways which synapses work in the brain. In this case, the memristors would act like synapses, meaning the kind of connection hubs between neurons that exchange information. And having this in the form of a microchip would maybe mimic neural activity and would also save power by being on standby when not needed, kind of like in the brain. And the reason shiitake mushroom is because it's a pretty resilient mushroom. We know it well, we cultivate it for food, it's robust, and it can resist stressors like getting electrocuted, which the scientists did to it.

31:47This is so cool. The The whole mycelial network thing has been explored, not just in Star Trek, but in lots of science fiction as a form of transmitting information or creating an intelligence or even evolving into its own form of intelligence. Some people think that mushrooms actually have a form of intelligence that they use their mycelial networks for. So that part of it's fascinating. But then not just making memristors that I'm going to stick in a sensor in my IoT device, but using it to replicate a neural network, which is what we are using to train large language models, right? Like being able to make that more power efficient, work with less power.

32:28That's a huge problem that people are trying to overcome. This is fascinating. What did they actually do? So they cultivated these mushrooms in petri dishes in a controlled environment, controlled temperature and humidity, and then dehydrated them just so they would last longer. And then they literally just took, you know, home hobby electrical cables and plugged them in and tested them out in different areas of the mushroom and at different electrical currents and did a variety of different circuits, just seeing whatever would work. So they were just testing the mushroom properties. It sounds like those old, you know, 500 projects you can do in your home.

33:09And it was just a pegboard with a four cables and a mushroom. Yeah. Yeah. Except this one was mushrooms. It's like a potato clock, but more complicated. Yeah. So so what did they find? So in this case, these like mycelium, which I'll do a little bit of mushroom biology, but this is kind of the underground root like structure of a fungus. kind of were used as a RAM-type component. And they found that the Memristor could switch between electrical states at about 5 ,000 signals per second with 90 % accuracy. As a comparison, some of the slowest commercially available Memristors perform at about half that speed.

33:51So they're not better, but it works, which is really interesting. So it's definitely a work in progress. One of the other interesting things that they noticed is that when they increase the voltage, the mushrooms performance decreased, but they could just fix that by adding additional mushrooms to the circuit. Okay. So that's interesting. And eventually you're going to hit a limit where you can't add any more mushrooms. There's only so many mushrooms. Yeah. But it shows the power efficiency of it. What are they thinking they could use this for to begin with? so they their memrist are made of mushrooms which they've called the mushrist of course it's already three words mashed into one now um they're saying it has a performance that's similar to a silicone chip but it has a little bit more potential as you mentioned it could be a lot cheaper it's scalable you can grow them as big as you want i know there's people that make like bricks out of mushrooms and sheets and all kinds of sizes like mycelium is very lightweight and very strong.

34:57So you could kind of grow it into whatever shape you want. And it's decomposable. It's environmentally friendly. So it kind of opens up the possibilities. The researchers were saying like, we have the tools to make this into whatever we want at whatever scale, whether that's at home or in a factory. Like this is pretty straightforward, actually. Yeah. There have been many attempts to replace silicon as the substrate for chips in the past. Nothing, you know, graphene is still used for lots of things, but nothing has actually unseated it. I'm not going to assume that mushrooms will unseat silicon, but probably like graphene start to find a niche where they are, they're incredibly useful.

35:36And it'll just be fun to say, oh yeah, that chip has a mushroom. It's based on mushrooms. Yeah. Eco-friendly chip. I mean, I think they're probably like not resistant to water. They're probably flammable in some capacity. So I can assume like there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to do this, but there's probably a niche somewhere where this is really cool. Yeah. Cause they are somewhat biodegradable. So you're going to, you're going to need to, you know, I guess that's a planned obsolescence built right in. We hadn't talked at some point about those robots that bury themselves and decompose.

36:08This could be one of the components and the biodegradable robots. Oh, you're right. That's perfect for that. Well, Dr. Nikki, thank you so much for bringing the mushrooms to our memristors today. If folks want to find more of what you do, in fact, you've got a cool thing going on shortly. Where should they go? Yes. So on Tuesday, December 9th, my lab is doing an educational live stream. We're going to be talking about goats for probably 12 hours. We'll see how long we make it. 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central. You can find all of the streaming links at NicoleAckermans.com slash live. We are basically doing a LAN party where I just need a lot more data.

36:48So we're all going to stuff ourselves into a room and collect and watch videos of ghost headbutting and collect data and talk about our research. And so please come and say hi. It's a lamb party. Yeah. That's amazing. Thank you, Nikki. Thanks for having me. Once again, if you want to hear Dr. Nikki talk headbutting research and more, head to NicoleAckerman.com forward slash live from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central Tuesday, December 9th. Yeah. And don't worry. I'm sure everything will be fine with using mushrooms inside of PCs. Right, Rob? Dude, just somebody give me some assurance that we are not about to start The Last of Us.

37:30Those kind of things scare me. You covered the Mycelial Network and Star Trek. What about The Last of Us? That seems dangerous. Mushrooms chasing me down the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't put them in the robots. That's what I say. uh well folks a reminder that if you're still looking for some good holiday gifts uh we have lots of great dtns stuff some of it with a really cool dtns logo that len peralta made for us some of it with a really interesting logo really cool retro logo that scott johnson made for us we've got len's holiday art if you're looking for some holiday stuff there's a techie santa art that he did uh go check it out we've got all kinds of cool stuff at dailytechnewsshow.com slash store.

38:13We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Rob B has thoughts after listening to our weekend interview with Mike about Phlox surveillance cameras. Yeah, we got a lot of good response to that interview. Rob is kind of representative of these. Rob B writes, this was a good show. Those cameras are still not something I love, but it's good to be reminded of what they can and can't be used for legitimately. My concerns are still around when they are misused, abused, or data is stolen. Most police, I think, want to try and do the right thing, but they, like everyone else, are humans, and humans will still do bad things.

38:49Those are the edges I think need to be protected. Thanks for helping us keep a good perspective, and thanks to the guest for trying to help educate us and being honest about the concerns. So, yeah, these things, I think the headline is what makes the news. But you have to really dig into what actually are they doing, what data can be infiltrated, those type of things. I think you have to dig beyond just the headline a lot when it comes to stories that are coming out these days. And I really liked how Mike tried to set people up to say, like, look, if you are concerned about these, here's who to talk to.

39:23And here are the best practices that should be being followed that you can follow up on and stuff like that. It was very informative. So thanks again to him for being willing to come on and talk about it. Yeah. So, folks, we love to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Dr. Nicky, Jason Howell, Justin Robert Young, and Rob B for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. If you find all this stuff valuable, this whole cast of characters today, become a patron.

39:57Patreon.com slash DTNS.

40:04The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.