As a general rule, anytime an article is titled with a question I presume the answer to be "No".
Instead of "Can New Metal-Air Transistors Replace Semiconductors and Continue Moore's Law?", the headline writer would love to write "New Metal-Air Transistors Replace Semiconductors and Continue Moore's Law". That would be more effective. The fact that the headline writer could not say this tells us something.
The same goes for weasel words like "may".
> I find heuristics like this to be anti-intellectual.
It is absolutely appropriate to detect what might have been said but was not, consider the motivations of the speaker, and infer non-importance appropriately.
Yes, it tells us that this is ongoing research. (And yes, you shouldn't have any high expectation that any specific preliminary research result will happen to change the world - yet, you can be sure that some will.)
In reading the article the question arises naturally but I wasn't able to answer it because I am not an expert of the domain. I thought that maybe others could be interested in the question so I posted it in hn. The conversation ended up being knowledgeable and interesting.
And yes, I would love these guys (or at least this solution) to succeed in continuing Moore's Law, why I wouldn't ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
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