You're telling me someone made bold, sweeping claims at a TED talk and really captured some rich pseudo-intellectual I-Am-Wealthy-And-Therefore-Smart people's interest...but then didn't deliver, even several years later?! Perish the thought! I think I've come to the realization that TED is just kickstarter for the wealthy.

ANYWAY, that's not really what the article is about, just a pet peeve.

It seems like there's probably a workable product underneath the smoke and mirrors if they had just...I don't know, worked on it harder? Done better? Nothing about a hydroponic environment with controllable levels of CO2 and other nutrients sounds all that inconceivable, they just felt like they had to lie about what it did I suppose. What frustrates me about this story is that the next people who try to make a version of this that works are going to have a harder time because of this lab's inability to admit that a design wasn't working and start over.

I suspect there's a story about the modern funding cycle making innovation harder for scientists, but I'll leave that argument for someone else to make - we've all heard it before, and I don't have any novel research that doesn't just rehash common knowledge (well...common knowledge among hubski users, anyway)