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 couple of months ago, TWiV fan Dave sent me an email about my apparent emotional stability in the face of, well, all this (imagine me waving my hands at the general state of the world in 2020): Dear sir, How do you stand it? Turbid Plaque and TWiV have been a lifeline for a drowning man, but it’s just not enough. I’m inundated, daily, with extreme behavior – recklessness and over-caution both in ridiculous proportion.

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.

On a blustery day in mid-December, TWiV co-host Vincent Racaniello and I, along with friend-of-the-show Islam Hussein, visited the picturesque campus of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, MA. Our primary job there was to record an episode of TWiV in front of a live audience, featuring Tufts researcher Jon Runstadler and members of his lab. You can check out that episode now on the TWiV site. Before the recording session, though, we got to tour New England’s only veterinary school, which occupies the former site of a state mental hospital.

In the November 1943 issue of the journal Genetics, Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück settled a long-running but arcane debate among bacteriologists. The original paper is freely downloadable, and is an amazing document to read today. There’s a delightful innocence in the simplicity of the experimental design, the lengthy explication of the theory behind the work, and the humbleness of the authors’ conclusions. There is no hint that the paper is describing the dawn of molecular biology, a field that would revolutionize humanity’s relationship with nature in ways that are still unfolding 75 years later.

Which contains more information: a five-minute video or a five-page document? As anyone who’s had to pay for excess cellular bandwidth knows, the video contains far more raw data than the text file. That doesn’t mean it has more information, though. What if the video shows someone reading a Dr. Seuss book aloud? Most of the raw data in the video would just be a binary encoding of the speaker’s picture, and a tiny bit of motion around their mouth.

The first time it happened was a hot August day in Maryland, the kind where the nicotine-saturated air inside the tiny, heavily air-conditioned house seemed to vie with the humidity and traffic haze outside, each competing to be more noxious than the other. Late in the afternoon, as I left for my night shift summer job, the steamy transition zone at the front door hit me with a silent thud. Sweat was already starting to bead on my back as I rolled down the windows in my Datsun.

For a modern reader, the most surprising thing about the Galàpagos Islands chapter in Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle is probably its brevity. Darwin describes the apparently recent volcanic origin of the place, runs through a quick list of its notable species, includes a figure of some finches’ beaks, and then departs for Tahiti. His entire visit to the islands lasted only five weeks, during a voyage of nearly five years.

Here’s something that doesn’t happen often: I disagree with my friend, podcast co-host, and former mentor Vincent Racaniello. He’s generally right about most things. But I have to part ways with his take on public health-related travel bans, which he explained in a recent post on his blog: Why is it important to stop travel out of the [Ebola virus] affected countries? While I’m confident that the US can detect and properly contain imported Ebola virus infections, not all countries will be able to do so.

title: Pricing Freedom in Science Publishing There’s been another dustup between advocates of open access science publishing and the world of traditional subscription-based scientific journals. That’s pretty much like having my old friends shouting at my boss, so yes, I’ve paid attention. In case you missed it, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes a very traditional journal called Science, is launching a new open access publication, Science Advances.