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Welcome to the Kotki Ride Home for Friday, December 18th, 2020.

I'm Jackson Bird.

Some ways that COVID could change science forever, both good and bad.

The business of Christmas trees and why we're still seeing the effects of the Great

Recession in tree prices today.

And a site that plays ambient noise from the forests of the world. Here are some of the cool

things from the news today. I and many others have talked a lot about how groundbreaking

the development of the COVID-19 vaccines

has been, how they could change vaccine development forever. And a new piece this week in the

Atlantic goes into depth about how COVID-19 in general, beyond just the vaccines, has changed

science and the ways that it may leave its mark. One initial indicator of COVID's impact is the

sheer number of papers that have been published about COVID-19, 74,000 and counting on PubMed

alone, more than any other disease, including polio, the measles, and Ebola. And part of that is

because there are simply more scientists than when some of those diseases were being studied.

Since 1960, the number of biological or medical researchers in the U.S. has gone from 30,000 to over 220,000.

But it was also because the virus spread so fast and that it spread to wealthy countries like the U.S., making it

...