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Welcome to the science podcast for December 18th, 2015. I'm Suzanne Bard. This is our last podcast of the year, and the show will return after a brief winter break on January 8th.

This is also my final show, and it's been a great pleasure filling in as co-host

during the past year. This week, we have David Grimm with a look back at some of the top

stories of the year, and then Robert Kuntz joins us to discuss science's breakthrough of the

year special issue. Support for the science podcast is provided by AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, advancing science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.

Now we have David Grimm, editor for our daily news site.

As part of our special end-of-the-year podcast, he's here to talk about some of the top stories of 2015.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

Okay, Dave, what do we mean when we say top stories here?

Well, this is different from the breakthrough of the year.

These aren't necessarily the most important stories of the year or not always even the most popular stories of the year. These are sort of our favorite online stories of the year. And so what that means is this is a mix of the stories that are readers like best as judged by the traffic to the stories, but also mixed in with some of my personal favorites, some of the quirkiest stories, some of the most silly or weird stories of the year.

So it's kind of a mishmash of just some of our favorite things that appeared over the site in 2015.

I'd also like to mention that we are sharing a few, but not all, of the top 10.

And so people will have to go to the site to see number one and a couple of the others.

That's right.

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