What most of you probably don’t know about me is that I’m an armchair scientist (emphasis on armchair). My college minor was geology and I took a variety of science classes as electives, simply because I love learning the what, why, where and how of life. If it had been a fathomable option for my generation and gender, I guess I would have become a scientist. But it really wasn’t, or didn’t seem so at the time, so for years I’ve read a lot about science – on a very superficial, novice-y level mind you, i.e., the annual
Best American Science and Nature Writing books,
Discover magazine (to which I have subscribed for years) and the books they recommend, and an occasional
Popular Science or
Scientific American, usually purchased in airports along with
People magazine (which reveals the dichotomy of my whacky interests.)
Anyway, one of my favorite issues of
Discover is the annual review of the top 100 science discoveries/stories of the year. Let’s see if I can summarize the top 10 in a couple of sentences, without boring you to tears. First, the list, then click on “Read More” for my “take” on each:
1. Vaccines & Autism
2. NASA – We Have a Problem
3. Anthropological Origins -Theory De Jour
4. Stem Cell Miracles
5. 12 Billion Years Ago
6. Swine Flu
7. Graphene – The New Silicon
8. Earth-Like Worlds Discovered
9. Burying Carbon Emissions
10. The Psychology of Overspending
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