This time of year, you pretty much have to do a “best of” post. I’ll get to a review of some of my own posts eventually, but in the meantime here are a handful of “best of” posts. I actually don’t know if they are the best of the best of, but they are just a few that caught my eye.

1. from Wired, The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science: Despite the annoyingly un-reader-friendly slide show format, there are some serious eye openers here, such as synthesis of completely new, man-made DNA base pairs; custom-designed monkeys with a “gene-editing system”; a potentially huge breakthrough on diabetes; and a study concluding that the number – not the number of species, but the actual number of wild animals – has decreased by half in the last 40 years.
2. Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing: This links to some great articles on education reform, the status and future of Microsoft, and Airbnb. But be warned, these are some seriously long reads!
3. Economist Money talks podcast, End of year edition. I would always rather read the transcript, but still this goes through some major trends from the year like oil prices, financial regulation, Uber and Lyft, and is worth a listen.
4. from Wired again, The Best Science Visualizations of the Year. Some interesting ones depict “genetic activity of ocean bacteria”, loss of Arctic summertime sea ice, and the origin and early spread of AIDS.
5. From Urbanful, Film’s 6 coolest (fictional) hydrid cities. Yes, the Los Angeles version of Blade Runner makes it. So do Gotham City and Metropolis, which are described as “New York by night” and “New York by day”. Finally, “Big Hero 6, the first collaboration between Disney and Marvel, takes place in the futuristic city of San Fransokyo, a fusion of San Francisco, California and Tokyo, Japan.”
6. One more from Wired: The Craziest Sci-Fi Fantasies That Got Closer to Reality This Year. There’s plenty of Star Wars vs. Star Trek here, but my favorites are that you can now get your dog cloned in South Korea, and a “cheetah robot”.

Happy new year!