Brief items, new year edition

 It's been a busy time, but here are a few items for news and discussion:

• President-Elect Biden named key members of his science team, and for the first time ever has elevated the role of Presidential Science Advisor (and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) to a cabinet-level position.  
• The President-Elect has also written a letter to the science advisor, outlining key questions that he wants to be considered.  
• There is talk of a "Science New Deal", unsurprisingly directed a lot toward the pandemic, climate change, and American technological competitiveness.
• The webcomic SMBC has decided to address controversy head on, reporting "Congressman Johnson comes out against Pauli Exclusion."  This would have rather negative unintended consequences, like destabilizing all matter more complex than elementary particles....
• This session promises to be an interesting one at the March APS meeting, as it goes right to the heart of how difficult it is to distinguish Majorana fermion signatures in superconductor/semiconductor hybrid structures from spurious electrical features.  I may try to write more about this soon.
• This paper (arxiv version) is very striking.  Looking in the middle of a sheet of WTe2 (that is, away from where the topological edge states live), the authors see quantum oscillations of the resistance as a function of magnetic field that look a lot like Landau quantization, even though the bulk of the material is (at zero field) quite insulating.  I need to think more carefully about the claim that this argues in favor of some kind of emergent neutral fermions.
• Being on twitter for four months has made me realize how reality-warping that medium is.  Reading about science on twitter can be incredibly wearing - it feels like seemingly everyone else out there is publishing in glossy journals, winning major prizes, and landing huge grants.  This is, of course, a selection effect, but I don't think it's healthy.
• I do think twitter has driven blog traffic up a bit, but I actually wonder if occasionally posting blog links to /r/physics on reddit would be far more effective in terms of outreach.  When one of my posts ends up there, it gets literally 50x the page views than normal.  Still, I have an old-internet-user aversion to astroturfing.