Now that everyone has digested their Thanksgiving dinners and leftovers – hopefully from small celebrations that didn’t involve traveling – it’s time to sift through recent science news again. There’s been a ton of COVID-19 related news, of course, but most of that has already been covered thoroughly by regular news outlets. Instead, this issue of the Filtrate will focus on stories that might’ve escaped notice. A broken dish The biggest and saddest non-pandemic science news this week was the collapse of the iconic radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

This week, the biggest science story was the news (so far only available in press releases and derived news stories) that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s experimental COVID-19 vaccines appear to be very effective. We need to see actual, peer-reviewed data of course, and a critical question will be whether these vaccines – both based on the same strategy – confer immunity from infection or only from disease. It’s exciting news in any case.

The big news of the past week, of course, was the promise of competent management returning to the US federal government soon, along with a very preliminary indication that the development of vaccines against COVID-19 is going well. Let’s see what else trickled through to the Filtrate. Still eradicating polio The seemingly endless campaign to eradicate polio grinds on. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed progress a bit, researchers and public health experts hope that a new vaccine design will help the beleaguered effort overcome one of its biggest obstacles.

A few days ago, the World Health Organization caused a stir by saying that antibody tests may not indicate whether someone is immune from SARS-CoV-2. This led to some understandable confusion, and WHO spokespeople have subsequently walked the comments back a bit. While the messaging might’ve been handled better, the public health experts at the WHO were trying to make a very important point. Several prominent politicians have advanced the idea of issuing “immunity passports” to people who’ve recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

As the shoutfest The Onion fittingly dubbed “The War for the White House” staggers towards its storm-soaked climax next Tuesday, there’s one fundamental question that I don’t think has really been answered yet: Why are scientists such raving liberals? We can’t deny that we look that way to the general public. Nature, which is to science what The Wall Street Journal is to investment banking, unabashedly endorsed President Obama for re-election.

One of the big problems facing whole-genome research efforts these days is archiving. A single experiment can generate a terabyte or more of data, and while it’s all conveniently stored on hard drives in the short term, that’s a poor medium for handing down the scientific heritage of mankind. The problem is twofold: digital data storage changes constantly, and many formats that were sold as “archival” have since turned out to be alarmingly perishable.

A new paper in the journal CHEST presents the case of a toddler who went into respiratory distress after receiving a smear of Vicks VapoRub under her nose. To figure out what happened, the researchers replicated the treatment in ferrets, whose respiratory systems are a good model for humans. The results were not exactly consistent with the Vicks “Breathe free” slogan: [VapoRub] stimulates mucin secretion and [mucociliary transport] in the … inflamed ferret airway.