By this time of the year, we are drowning  in Best Of 2013 lists, featuring the most important events and discoveries of the year. I like to take a different tack here: I’ve deliberately strayed away from things that made other lists, like those from Wired, Nature, Scientific American, Science and, yes, National Geographic. There will be no Voyager, dark matter, olinguitos, BRAIN Initiative, or H7N9. For the same reason, and with sadness, I’m also omitting a few topics that I covered including the oldest hominin DNA ever sequenced, and lab-grown model brains.

Instead, this is a list of my favourite stories, compiled for no other reason that I loved learning and writing about them. It’s a list of