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Thank you. and quote, Science Podcast to receive special offers. Welcome to the Science Podcast for December 23, 2016.

I'm Sarah Cresby.

In this week's show, news editor Tim Appenzeller

joins Alexa Billo to discuss science's breakthrough and runners-up.

I talked to online editor David Graham about this year's top news stories, and in a bonus segment, Valerie Thompson,

Science's book review editor, shares some of the best science books for the year.

Now we have David Grimm, editor for our daily news site. He's here to talk about some of this year's top online news stories. So, Dave, we've got big online winners, meaning they got a lot of hits and some of your favorites. So let's start with one of the big online stories this year. We covered some of them. How about this one? Undead genes. What do we need undead genes for?

I think we did cover this one. This is a very sort of macabre study about scientists trying to figure

out after we die are our genes still active. And if so, which genes are active? And they

looked at about a thousand genes and they found that a lot of them, surprisingly,

were either active after the body died and they looked at mice and zebrafish, I believe,

or actually turned on, became active after these organisms died, which is really unusual.

And some of these genes do things that you might expect.

Maybe they respond to inflammation.

And of course, when the body is dying or decomposing, maybe you would have genes turn on that

deal with injury and things like that. But other ones were genes involved in development,

...