Well if it just evolved this ability that suggests it found a unique niche. But it probably hasn’t optimized this, since it doesn’t have any pressure to compete against other organisms for the radiation source.

But the good news is that we could selectively breed the fungus, or even generically engineer it (once the genes are isolated) to maximize the ability much faster.

I don’t know how useful it would be for site cleanup but it might at least become good insulation (like the idea of space station shielding mentioned in the article).

Ah yeah I bet you’re right. I’m probably conflating the more serious articles I’ve read with aspirational (near-future sci-fi) material. Yes, quantum encryption should be much more practical and achievable.

its not useful for communication if you need to know that the other placed tried to communicate before measuring.

But I don’t think you do. The classic slower-than-light communication here is just to verify the results. Once this system is operational, then by measuring the remote particles, you know exactly what information was sent.

This of course assumes very good transmission fidelity (or error correction), and that the local sending side has some way to control the state their particle wavefunctions collapse into (otherwise they’re just sending random noise).

They observe/measure the local particle first (LA) which causes the entangled system to collapse into definite states. Then they measure the remote particle (RA) afterward to confirm that it matches the expectation.

They know the “when” that the wavefunction collapse occurs for RA – it’s the moment they chose to observe LA. The “magic” of entanglement is that it’s not bound by the speed of light and effectively instantaneous.

I’m no expert but I think this is how it works. We’ll call the particle pairs A, B, C, etc.

So when the researchers measure Local particle A (LA for short), the nature of entanglement means that Remote particle A (RA) must collapse into a specific known state. So they measure RA after that happens. The same is true for pairs LB and RB, LC and RC, and so on. Then they check statistically if the remote particles are all in the predicted states (should be 100% if this works flawlessly).

With enough repetition they can have very high confidence in the results. Of course those results must be communicated over traditional (non-entangled) channels that we already trust for reliability.

edit: typo