I’m really pleased by the results released this morning for the Pfizer vaccine candidate. It feels like a tipping point for this fight and a welcome development for the incoming Biden Administration.

First, I subscribe to Tolstoy’s view of history rather than Carlyle’s “Great Man” viewpoint. So, from my point of view, where the US find’s itself in this particular election is not so much a function of the person currently holding the office, but more of where the US polity is right now.

Second, the problem of humanity’s position with regards to the rest of the biosphere aren’t going to really change after Tuesday. Whoever wins, the climate disruption will continue and the follow-on effects, both predicted and unknown, will continue to challenge us.

Third, much goes on outside the borders of the United States: some good, some bad, but all of interest in any case. I am intrigued by the entire notion of the Pacific Rim as a geo-political entity. Mostly, it seems to have a dynamism that the rest of the geopolitical world lacks these days.

Finally, the US continues to be beautiful–the land itself is the greatest asset of this place that I call home.

There is an excellent review by Florian Krammer in this week’s Nature. For those without the patience to read it, here’s the relevant figure. Bottom-line, things are progressing. Of late, I’ve found the non-scientific media not particularly helpful on the subject of COVID19.

I hope. Here’s one running for US Senator in Wyoming, Merav Ben-David. Anytime I see scientists entering the political arena I want to cheer them on. Our profession needs to become far more active in setting an agenda for the future. And that can’t be done entirely outside of politics. She’s running as a Dem. Now let’s see a scientist step up from the other side of the aisle. Oh wait, here’s one with an impeccable NSF record. Kelvin?

I don’t find myself often agreeing with David Brooks, but today’s column in the NYT was excellent. There is certainly a lot to fix and it’ll definitely be “the work of a generation”.

I’ve been following the Artemis Accords closely. They represent a follow-on to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the immediate context is the US goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2024. I’m less interested in the return trip to the Moon than I am in future legal frameworks for Space.

With regards to such legal frameworks:

To my mind there is the question of extraction of valuable resources from the Solar System and the property rights that might accompany those. Then there is the question of how, in the future, the notion of Westphalian nation states might extend off the planet. An additional question is about the militarization of space by current nations although it looks to me that the horse has already left the barn on that one.

N.B. As a matter of record, I’m inclined to oppose the notion of a separate US Space Force because I think such a DOD organization will push us further down the road of deploying offensive weapons on orbit–a bad thing, in my opinion.

• What shapes toxin evolution towards signal transduction nodes and edges
• Next generation gas flux measurements beyond eddy covariance
• Angiotensin Converting Enzyme II
• Why plants lost protein kinase C and changed other aspects of phospholipid signaling
• How software designed radio could empower environmental sensor networks
• Planetary hysteresis mechanisms on Earth and Mars
• The origins of cellular electrical excitability
• How the ribosome came to be

Fantastic news this morning as the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for CRISPR gene editing. Story here. I’m proud that NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate played an important role in supporting Dr. Doudna’s research through the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Kudos to the winners and their funders.

This morning I had a fascinating video conversation with a former postdoc, now associate professor. We were talking about a neuroscience concept called the cell assembly–an idea that had its genesis in the lab of my Dad’s postdoc advisor, Donald Hebb at McGill University in the early 1950’s. Basically the idea goes something like this:

Memories, perceptions, concepts are all stored in the human brain via spatially-separated collectives of neurons that are bound together by their activity (firing action potentials). The pithy version of this goes: neurons that fire together, wire together.

In any case this allows individual neurons to participate in many such cell assemblies and the available cell assemblies based on the combinatorial mathematics of c. 86 billion neurons is very large. Further, these cells assemblies (think each containing perhaps 300 members) are very robust. With a symphony orchestra, you probably won’t notice any single instrument dropping out during Beethoven’s 9th symphony finale. Same with cell assemblies.

I am still very much struck by this construct of cell assemblies. As neuroscience has progressed, this is an idea that is very much evergreen.

The NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) was commissioned last year for a likely 3-decade campaign to collect biosphere data across the United States. While some of that data is collected by humans, a lot of the data is automatically sensed and then logged to cyber-infrastructure for later analysis. Another NSF-funded project called SAGE, led by Pete Beckman of Northwestern University (full disclosure, I’m on that team), is working to add AI at the Edge capability to those sensors so that they can be triggered in real time by events such as fire or flood to reconfigure their software for different capabilities.

Meanwhile, there are other things to sense beyond NEON’s current domains: earthquakes, wildfires, and public health emergencies. And there are natural experiments to that lend themselves to adding consequential knowledge to our nation: population gradients from pristine land to urban centers, geo-chemical gradients and different state policy solutions come to mind.

And NEON’s airborne sensor program, currently implemented in human-piloted aircraft, seems to me to be begging to migrate to drones and data-fused with on-orbit sensors like NASA’s OCO2 satellite.

In short, there is much work to be done. And this needs to be built on-top of the infrastructure that already exists–a spiral design scenario. This preserves the considerable set of investments that have already been made, but generates new and better capabilities.