Last Friday, I was elected President of my local amateur radio club. As is typical for such elections, I was running unopposed, and had essentially been drafted into the position by the previous President (I’ll get you for this some day, Larry). In fact, many ham radio clubs are either on the brink of extinction, or have already gone under, unable to maintain enough participants to keep them running. Even with over 130 members, the Hampden County Radio Association struggles to get volunteers, not only for the administrative positions but for our regular activities.

A common trope in fantasy and science fiction is the ancient civilization whose vast knowledge was somehow lost to the ages. The idea resonates, because whether we’re conscious of it or not, we all know that knowledge is perishable. Not only do we forget things as individuals, but societies routinely lose vast quantities of information over time. Scholars estimate that 90% of texts from antiquity are now gone, and if you’ve ever tried to access an old computer file on a floppy disk, you know that we’re still actively losing access to old data.

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.