I don’t really like end-of-the-year lists. They seem a bit too self-knowing and forced, and there are just so many of them, particularly because we’re heralding the end of a decade too. I half-expect someone to create a Top Ten Years of the Decade list (and Time Out would probably put 1977 in there just to be edgy).

This might seem like a funny way of introducing an end-of-the-year list, but I’ve tried to make this one a bit different. This is not a collection of the “top” scientific discoveries of the year. I’m not calling them “breakthroughs”. I’m not judging them on such abstract and subjective measures as “quality” or “significance”. There is no Ardi and no ice on the